The Reapers
After George Henry Boughton British
Not on view
A young woman wearing a white ruffled cap, short jacket, and skirt protected by an apron carries refreshment to harvesters in a field. While this book or periodical illustration is titled "The Reapers," it also relates to paintings Boughton made in response to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "Evangeline." That verse describes an Acadian community of French settlers living in Canada's Maritime provinces and northern Maine, forcefully deported during the French and Indian (or Seven Years') War in 1755–64. Details inspired by the poem include stoneware flagons carried by the subject, as well as her French cap and earrings:
"When in the harvest heat she bore to the reapers at noontide
Flagons of home-brewed ale, ah! fair in sooth was the maiden.
Fairer was she when, on Sunday morn...
Wearing her Norman cap and her kirtle [gown] of blue, and the ear-rings,
Brought in the olden time from France..."
