The Goose Girl

By 1891 the young painters in Paris were breaking the picture apart. Monet was out in the fields with his haystacks, and Van Gogh had died the summer before. Bouguereau, then 66, went on doing exactly what had made him the most bankable painter in France: smooth, life-size peasant girls, barefoot on a dirt road. This one tends a flock of white geese and turns to smile back over her shoulder, rosy and unbothered. American collectors could not get enough of these pictures, which is how a French goose girl ended up in Ithaca, New York, in Cornell's museum. The wand in her hand is a herder's tool, marking her small job of keeping the geese together.