A jovem pastora

Bouguereau painted this in 1885, and by then the world it shows was already slipping away. Across France peasants were leaving the fields for the new factory towns, and the countryside these barefoot girls once worked was emptying out. That is part of why a picture like this sold so well, especially to collectors in Europe and the United States. It offered a calm, unspoiled rural France to buyers who mostly lived in cities and knew that France was disappearing. Look at how carefully she is finished, the smooth skin and the clean folds of her clothes, when a real shepherdess after a day of work would look nothing like this. Bouguereau worked in a long pastoral tradition that reached back through Watteau and Poussin to ancient Greek poetry, painting country life as something graceful rather than hard. The San Diego Museum of Art bought this particular canvas in 1968, when his kind of polished salon painting had fallen so far out of fashion that it could be had cheaply.