The Education of the Virgin

In June 1842 Delacroix spent a couple of weeks at Nohant, the country house of his friend the novelist George Sand. Walking back through the park one day, he came upon the wife of Sand's tenant farmer giving her little daughter a reading lesson, the older woman's hand resting on the child's shoulder. He told a friend he had just seen a superb subject for a picture, and he turned it into Saint Anne teaching the young Virgin to read, set in that same park. The large canvas from that summer stayed with Sand, and today it is in the Musée Delacroix in Paris. This smaller version, painted in 1852, is his return to the scene a decade later, on a canvas less than half as wide. The garden in both pictures was Sand's own. She was a serious botanist who looked after the Nohant park herself, and in 1844 Delacroix wrote to her that his love of gardens and flowers was probably why he loved her so much.