Two Italian Peasant Women and a Child

This canvas dates from 1849, the year a French army laid siege to Rome to restore the Pope's rule, and none of that reaches this quiet hillside. Gérôme had travelled in Italy a few years earlier, in 1843, seeing Florence, Rome and Pompeii. The title he later exhibited the picture under, Souvenir d'Italie, calls it a memory. A young woman walks straight toward us with a basket heaped with greenery balanced on her head and a naked child held against her hip, her gaze level and unsmiling. Beside her an older woman, bent under a bundle, leans on a stick. Both wear white head coverings and the full white sleeves of country dress, and a striped apron hangs below the child. Farther up the stony path, small figures are still climbing. The Musée d'Orsay bought the painting in 2007.