The Potters Daughter

The painting was Signed and dated 1886 on the lower left. It was relined and It had some infill paint above the vase, and a hole repair just below her elbow.

Millet, during his life was considered the foremost authority on Greek and Roman dress.  He often gave lectures on both the European and American continents.  This painting is a part of a large group of Greek and Roman genre works.

Millet was occasionally criticized for his Greek and Roman genre works a trying to idealize a past that never existed.  His work was compared to Abbey, Sargent and Bouguereau  as trying to create a fanciful representation  of that period of time.  However, this is a broad brush criticism that while Millet did paint beautiful women, it overlooks the careful detail and accurate representations of what the archeology of the time was reconstructing as historically correct.

The Potter’s Daughter is a representation of the creation of a pot like many of those which were being uncovered in Greece at the time.