The Goose Girl

For centuries European painters had used the female nude in a landscape as a way to show a goddess or a nymph. Millet, working around 1863, took that convention and stripped the myth out of it. His bather is a goose girl, a farm servant, who has pulled off her coarse clothes and clogs to wash in a river while her flock waits further downstream. She is thin and adolescent, caught in an unguarded pose, and nothing about her suggests Venus. Millet worked toward this picture through studies made over roughly seven years. It hangs now in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, bought by the American collector Henry Walters in 1905.