The Shepherdess

Pissarro painted this at Pontoise in 1881, the year the French parliament made primary school free. Compulsory schooling followed in 1882, and across the countryside children who had spent their days minding animals in the fields were pulled into classrooms. The girl here is doing the older job, sitting with a stick in her hand and the sheep behind her. Around this time Pissarro began enlarging his peasants, bringing a single figure right to the front of the canvas where a landscape painter would once have kept a small distant silhouette. He showed the picture in the spring of 1882 at the seventh Impressionist exhibition. The Musée d'Orsay carries it under both of its titles, The Shepherdess and Young Girl with a Stick.