The Milk Maid

Winslow Homer

National Gallery of Art

A pale-skinned young woman stands facing our right on a grassy hillside also occupied by two cows, a rooster, and a chicken in this vertical watercolor. The palette is dominated with olive, forest, and sage green with touches of mauve pink, brown, and black. The woman’s body is angled slightly toward us, but her head turns away so we see her in profile. She wears a long, pale mauve-pink dress with a charcoal-gray and rust-brown scarf draped over her shoulders. White stockings and brown shoes peek out from under the ankle-length hem. A boxy, pale pink form, perhaps a bonnet, hangs down her back from a slender ribbon around the front of her neck. Her arms rest at her sides as she holds a small wooden stool in one hand and the handle of a wooden pail in the other. Just in front of her feet, a caramel-brown chicken pecks at the ground as the rooster, with a flounce of black tail feathers, looks alertly into the distance. The cluster of trees in the near distance beyond the young woman nearly fill the rest of the scene with their leafy canopies. Two cows are under the trees, one to either side of the woman. A chocolate-brown cow with a white face lies down on the left, while a ginger-brown cow stands on the right. Sunlight peeks in through a few gaps in the leaves. A portion of a distant slate-blue mountain and patch of pale peach sky are visible over the cow’s head in the lower left. The artist signed and dated the lower left, “HOMER 1878.”