Working in his native village of Gruchy in Normandy during the Franco-Prussian war (1870-1871), Millet found art supplies difficult to obtain. To create this grand depiction of a French peasant, Millet reused a canvas from an earlier painting—a multi-figure biblical scene, oriented horizontally—that he had exhibited at the Salon in 1848. That work never found a buyer and, by 1850, Millet had turned his attention to contemporary rural life, which would remain his focus for the rest of his career. Young Shepherdess, painted two decades later, is one of his largest works and one of his last. Its low viewpoint and monumental scale bestow on the “lowly” peasant the status of a saint or goddess.

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