The old lady with geese

In 1868 Nicolae Grigorescu was living at Barbizon, the village south of Paris where a group of French painters had gone to paint peasants and woodland instead of grand historical scenes. He had grown up poor in Bucharest, painting icons as a boy, and a state scholarship had carried him to France a few years earlier. At Barbizon he worked near Millet and Corot and took up their subjects: field workers, animals, ordinary light. An old woman herding her geese is the kind of humble rural motif that circle prized. Grigorescu was in his late twenties, still years from the fame he would find at home in Romania, where field workers and their animals became his lifelong subject.