Shepherdess Sitting at the Edge of the Forest

In the French countryside of the 1840s, minding the sheep or the cows was very often a child's job, and no law yet obliged a village child to be in school. That came only with the Ferry laws of 1881 and 1882, which made primary school first free and then compulsory. The shepherdess Millet painted here, around 1848 or 1849, looks young. She sits at the foot of a huge dark tree trunk on a bank at the edge of a wood, in a white cap, a pale ochre hooded cape around her shoulders and a blue apron, with a long staff slanting across her body down to the path. Her eyes are lowered, and the museum describes her as seemingly lost in thought. The canvas is small, 32 centimetres high. The light falls on her cape and skirt, while the wood behind her stays almost black. Millet signed it in full in the lower right corner.