La Laitière

A young milkmaid stands barefoot in a wooded clearing, a gleaming brass milk-can balanced on her head as she steadies herself with a raised arm, a basket at her feet, her white blouse and gathered skirt bright against the browns and greens of the pasture behind her. Jean-Baptiste Huet, who made his name with the rustic and pastoral subjects so fashionable in the second half of the eighteenth century, gives the girl the elegance of an antique water-carrier — the museum points to Perrette, the heedless milkmaid of La Fontaine’s fable, as her literary cousin, in the spirit of the idealized peasantry that would culminate in Marie-Antoinette’s dairy at the Petit Trianon. The painting is held in the Musée Cognacq-Jay, le goût du XVIIIe, Paris.