Little Bo-Peep
| Support Type: | Paper |
| Paint Type: | Ink |
| Current Location: | Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery |
| Location History: | Other copies of this painting are also featured in the Glessner House and the NYPL Digital Collections. |
This painting depicts a little girl in a pink dress with golden curls, a yellow hat with laurels, and a crook in her hand by a river with yellow flowers nearby, desperately in search of something. The little girl is Little Bo-Peep, a young shepherdess from a famous English nursery rhyme of the same name. This illustration is from the children’s book The Baby's Opera: A Book of Old Rhymes with New Dresses by Walter Crane, known for being a writer and illustrator of Victorian children’s books. There are many versions of this painting, with Little Bo-Peep’s dress portrayed in different colours. On the bottom of the painting is sheet music for the nursery rhyme, including all five verses. This nursery rhyme is about Little Bo-Peep losing her sheep, and the narrator initially reassuring her of their return. Although Little Bo-Peep sees her sheep in her dream, she realises that they are still missing when she wakes up, and decides to go look for them. When Little Bo-Peep finally finds her sheep, she notices that they had “left their tails behind them,” a reference to docking lambs’ tails during this time, similar to the common practice of docking corgis’ tails.
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