The Little Shepherdess

Although Paul Peel was committed to academic art and thus to a high degree of iconography and pictorial composition according to certain aesthetic standards, his work has an impressionistic character. In the act "The Little Shepherdess", this is not only clear by the style of painting, but also by some details of the subject. The Impressionists wanted to capture the fleetingness of a moment and thus emphasize especially the - just as the waves that are now forming - the foot that has just been submerged in the water and the herdsman frozen in motion, who only casually looks at the pond, just this suggestion. But this is not the only exhilaration that Peel succeeds in doing. He also manages to paint a female act that has an innocent and not sexually explicit or even disreputable effect on the viewer.