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.
There was a better quality version of the picture available on one of the other sources provided. The description is sufficient, some links to the sources are broken and cannot be accessed. Article is also very high on plagiarism and AI generation.
