Shepherdess Seated in the Shade

In February 1915 the Museum of Fine Arts opened a new wing for its paintings, and the whole cost had been met by one donor, Maria Antoinette Evans. Her husband, Robert Dawson Evans, had made his fortune in rubber and died in 1909, and the two of them had been collecting pictures together. This Millet was theirs by 1908, when he lent it to an exhibition in Boston. Before that it had gone through the hands of a collector in London, dealers in Paris and an auction in New York. When Mrs Evans died in 1917, she left it to the museum. Millet painted it in 1872, near the end of his life. A girl in a red cap sits on the ground at the foot of a tree, with a spindle and wool in her lap and her hands gone still. Spots of sunlight come through the leaves onto her face, her apron and the ground around her, and on the left the trees open onto a bright, hazy field.