A Boêmia

When William-Adolphe Bouguereau first finished this picture in 1889, the barefoot young woman with a violin in her lap sat against a plain wall of bare stone, and nothing behind her told you where she was. It did not sell. A photograph survives of that first version. The following year a prospective buyer asked for a better setting, so Bouguereau went back into the canvas and opened the wall onto the river Seine, with Notre-Dame de Paris rising across the water and the Pont de l'Archeveche crossing behind her. The model was a girl he used more than once. That second, expanded view is the one that later crossed the Atlantic and hung for nearly eighty years in Minneapolis as a museum favorite.