Young Shepherdess

In 1983 the museum's conservators X-rayed this canvas, looking for small changes Millet might have made, and found a whole other painting underneath, turned on its side. It was The Captivity of the Jews in Babylon, a large biblical scene he had shown at the Salon of 1848. Its subject came from Psalm 137, the exiles who hang their harps on the willows by the rivers of Babylon and refuse to sing for their captors. In the X-ray a soldier can still be made out pushing a harp at a woman who pulls away. The picture never found a buyer and had long been counted as lost. Alfred Sensier, Millet's friend and biographer, had written that it was painted over, though he thought the new picture was a sheep shearer. During the war of 1870 Millet stayed on the Normandy coast and could hardly get materials, so he took the old canvas out of storage and painted this girl on it. She sits on a grassy rise in a wide straw hat, sheep around her, a broad plain behind. At more than one and a half metres tall, it is the largest of the museum's Millets. Samuel Dennis Warren, a paper manufacturer, gave it to the museum in 1877.