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The exact year Bouguereau finished this is uncertain, but by 1867 it had already found a buyer named Theo van Gogh, an art dealer whose younger brother Vincent was still a teenager in the Netherlands and years away from painting anything. Look at where the girl is standing. That is a real bridge over the Seine in Paris, and the towers rising behind her are Notre-Dame. She holds a violin, which tells you she plays in the street for coins, and Bouguereau has posed her at the moment before she starts, or just after she has stopped, looking off past the frame with nothing in her face you could call hope. He was the most celebrated academic painter in France, the man collectors paid enormous sums for polished mythological scenes, and here he spent that same immaculate technique on a barefoot child no one would have looked at twice on the actual bridge.