Young Woman Churning Butter

A young woman stands at a tall wooden churn, both hands on the plunger, driving it down through the cream, her sleeves pushed up and a blue apron bunched at her hip. Millet painted her at the end of the 1840s or the start of the 1850s, on a wooden panel more than half a metre tall, and the picture then had a busy career on the market. In 1873 it was sold in Paris from the collection of a Marquis de La Rochebousseau, who did not exist. The title was a cover name used by Léon Gauchez, an art dealer from Brussels. Five years later it changed hands again in Paris, and in 1886 it was auctioned in New York. The dealers Knoedler bought it and the very next day sold it to Frederick Lothrop Ames, a Boston railroad investor, though their stock book entered it as The Wood Chopper. Ames lent it to the Museum of Fine Arts that same spring. It then stayed in his family for 80 years, until his daughter-in-law gave it to the museum in 1966.