The Goosegirl

A girl with a hand on a tree stands small, and white geese gather on the blue water in the foreground. Beyond the green meadow, rows of houses can also be seen.

Millet, who moved from Paris to the village of Barbizon in the spring of 1849, exhibited a work with the same title, The Goosegirl, at the 1867 Salon. In a letter to his friend Sensier that same year, he wrote that he wanted to paint it so that the cries of the geese would fill the whole picture.

This work was formerly owned by Sensier and appears to have been painted at the same time and in the same place as the Salon work, and is regarded as the core of the series on the goosegirl theme. The oil paint is applied so thinly that the underdrawing lines show through, and with a watercolor-like effect it conveys the atmosphere of the waterside in summer sunlight. It differs in character from the group of works depicting adult labor, and is described as a mature late masterpiece that expresses a purely pastoral world.