The Belated Kid

Hunt began this monumental image of a peasant girl and her rescued kid about 1854, when he was working with the French realist painter Jean-François Millet in Barbizon, a village outside Paris. He finished it after returning home to Newport, Rhode Island, in 1857. It proved so popular when exhibited in the United States that Boston collector Peter Chardon Brooks (who on Hunt’s recommendation also became a great patron of Millet) commissioned a replica.

The painting clearly was inspired by Millet’s pictures of peasant children [17.1484], especially those depicting young girls diligently watching over one or two cows or sheep. In Hunt’s version of the subject, a kid that strayed and was found again is carried home by a pretty barefoot shepherdess. To add to the sentimental mood of the painting, Hunt shows a mother goat following them closely as though to express gratitude for the rescue. While Hunt’s image echoes Millet’s images of rural labor, it is considerably more romantic in its presentation of the innocence and goodness of these hardworking peasant children. The large scale of the figure is tempered by soft contours, delicate colors, and subdued lighting to create an image that is both noble and tender.

This text was adapted from Carol Troyen and Janet L. Comey, Amerikakaigakodomo no sekai [Children in American art], exh. cat. (Nagoya, Japan: Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2007).