小小的哄劝

By 1890 William-Adolphe Bouguereau was one of the richest and most decorated painters in France, in his mid-60s, weighed down with medals and Salon honours. He had found a subject that never stopped selling: idealized peasant children, barefoot and clean, painted with a finish so smooth the brushmarks disappear. Here two sisters sit on a stone step, an orange set beside them, the smaller one leaning in to kiss the other and coax something out of her. The title names that small act of persuasion. A great deal of his work went abroad, above all to wealthy American collectors who wanted exactly this kind of polished, sentimental scene for their new mansions. This picture, like most of them, passed into private hands and has stayed there ever since.