Girl by a Stream, Flanders

Genre paintings—images of common people engaged in everyday activities—appealed to wealthy Americans of the 1800s. Works by the American artist Daniel Ridgway Knight, who spent much of his life in France, are typical of the rather sentimental scenes of country life popular at the time. This peasant girl has been mowing near the stream bank. She has piled the yellow-flowered cuttings into a large cloth bag and now stands resting with a melancholy gaze, her scythe at her side.