''The Shepherdess'' (), also known as ''The Little Shepherdess'', is a

painting Painting is a Visual arts, visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called "matrix" or "Support (art), support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with ...

William-Adolphe Bouguereau William-Adolphe Bouguereau (; 30 November 1825 – 19 August 1905) was a French Academic art, academic painter. In his realistic genre paintings, he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of Classicism, classical subjects, with a ...

completed in 1889. The title is taken from the Southern French dialect. The painting depicts an

idyll An idyll (, ; ; occasionally spelled ''idyl'' in American English) is a short poem, descriptive of rustic life, written in the style of Theocritus's short pastoral poems, the ''Idylls'' (Εἰδύλλια). Unlike Homer, Theocritus did not engag ...

ic,

pastoral The pastoral genre of literature, art, or music depicts an idealised form of the shepherd's lifestyle – herding livestock around open areas of land according to the seasons and the changing availability of water and pasture. The target au ...

scene of a lone young woman in

peasant A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasan ...

attire posed for the artist, balancing a stick (likely her

crook Crook is slang for criminal. Crook or Crooks may also refer to: Places Canada * Crooks Inlet, former name of Kangiqturjuaq, Nunavut England * Crook, County Durham, a town * Crook, Cumbria, a village and civil parish * Crook Hill, Derby ...

) across her shoulders, standing barefooted in the foreground. In the background are

oxen An ox (: oxen), also known as a bullock (in BrE, British, AusE, Australian, and IndE, Indian English), is a large bovine, trained and used as a draft animal. Oxen are commonly castration, castrated adult male cattle, because castration i ...

grazing in a field. It is one of many paintings by Bouguereau depicting

shepherd A shepherd is a person who tends, herds, feeds, or guards flocks of sheep. Shepherding is one of the world's oldest occupations; it exists in many parts of the globe, and it is an important part of Pastoralism, pastoralist animal husbandry. ...

esses, including one of the same name created in 1881. The subject is a

model A model is an informative representation of an object, person, or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin , . Models can be divided in ...

employed by Bouguereau for this and other paintings, including '' The Bohemian''. ''The Shepherdess'' is currently in the permanent collection at the

Philbrook Museum of Art Philbrook Museum of Art is an art museum with expansive formal gardens located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The museum, which opened in 1939, is located in a former 1920s villa, "Villa Philbrook", the home of Oklahoma oil pioneer Waite Phillips and his ...

Tulsa Tulsa ( ) is the second-most-populous city in the state of Oklahoma, after Oklahoma City, and the 48th-most-populous city in the United States. The population was 413,066 as of the 2020 census. It is the principal municipality of the Tul ...

, where it has become an emblematic image for the museum. It was the central image of a

travelling exhibition A travelling exhibition, also referred to as a "travelling exhibit" or a "touring exhibition", is a type of exhibition that is presented at more than one venue. Temporary exhibitions can bring together objects that might be dispersed among sever ...

about Bouguereau and his students that Philbrook created in 2006.James Frederick Peck, ''In the Studios of Paris: William Bouguereau & His American Students'' (

, 2006), . Listing at

Google Books Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical charac ...

br> here

References

External links

''The Little Shepherdess'' at the Philbrook Museum of Art
1889 paintings Paintings by William-Adolphe Bouguereau Cattle in art Paintings in the Philbrook Museum of Art Oil on canvas paintings Farming in art {{1880s-painting-stub

See also

References

External links