Daughter of Fisherman

A young girl with a yellow scarf tied around her head carries a large net on her left shoulder and a basket on her right arm, glancing off to the side. She wears a white blouse, a dark bodice, and a reddish-brown skirt, and blue sea is visible at the left of the background. It is oil on canvas, measuring 116.0 x 87.5 cm.

According to the museum's commentary, from the 1870s on, Bouguereau produced many stylized works such as loving mothers and children and charming girls in pastoral landscapes. This work is one of the pastoral girl portraits from that period. The seaside setting and clothing are plain, and only the color and pattern of the head scarf are bright, so the viewer's eye is drawn to the porcelain-smooth rendering of the exposed skin of the face, neck, and arms.

Bouguereau was a pupil of the neoclassical painter Picot, won the Prix de Rome in 1850, and exhibited large history and mythological paintings at the Salon. He is also known as a conservative who rejected the paintings of Manet and the Impressionists, and it is explained that the phrase "Bouguereau style" was sometimes used as the opposite of Impressionism.