The Young Mother (Charity)

For centuries painters had shown Charity, one of the Christian virtues, as a woman nursing and sheltering infants. Puvis de Chavannes took that old allegory and set it on an ordinary riverbank in autumn. A young mother in a loose lilac dress sits beneath two tall trees, feeding a baby, one hand resting on a dark dog lying beside her. A small naked child reaches up toward a leafy branch. Across the water are fields and a house with a red roof. Painted around 1887, the canvas appeared that year as The Young Mother in the exhibition of his work that the dealer Durand-Ruel held in Paris. Later owners called it Maternity or Charity. In 1932 the American millionaire Frank Jay Gould bought it at auction in Paris, and the Musée d'Orsay acquired it in 2003.