PATCHWORK SKIRT WITH HALO Saint Genevieve, sporting the Christian peasant fashion of 1887.
  • PATCHWORK SKIRT WITH HALO Saint Genevieve, sporting the Christian peasant fashion of 1887.

Usually, the 19th-century paintings at the Frye are ones you've seen before—why hello, my favorite ram and ewe in the world—because they're from the always-on-view permanent collection amassed by Charles and Emma Frye, rearranged and reinterpreted every new season of exhibitions. (This is how permanent collections work.)

But a new 19th-century peasant has appeared this summer at the Frye. She's the better part of eight feet tall and, well, just look at her up there. She's pretty buttered-up for a peasant.

She's by Charles Sprague Pearce (1851-1914), a Boston-born artist who moved to France to study painting and became a European expatriate, like many American artists of pre- and early modernism. Genevieve is the patron saint of Paris; she lived in the 5th century. She was born in a village seven miles outside Paris, but eventually she moved into the city and became its protector, leading Parisians to divert an attack and avoid being sacked by Attila the Hun. Note that Genevieve was a vegetarian: She has no intention of eating these cows.

Why does Pearce picture her in the bucolic country (with those skeletal 19th-century Romantic ruin-barns) rather than in the city? By 1887, there's plenty of nostalgia for the old Paris, the medieval, huddled, villagey (more disease-ridden) Paris—the one that persisted before the modernization/regularization/homogenization of the radical Haussmann renovation plan (1853-1870).

Pearce's own history is that at first he thought he'd become his father's son, working in his father's successful mercantile business in Boston. Changing his mind, he decided to become an artist instead. He moved to Paris to study in an atelier, then set out to travel as a certain kind of gentleman would, including down the Nile in Egypt. Pearce eventually became known not only for peasant scenes but for Orientalist visions (probably they were to him two sides of one coin). By 1887, when he painted the patron saint of Paris, he had settled in a village 20 miles outside Paris, where he lived out the rest of his life with his French wife.

His Genevieve is on long-term loan from an anonymous lender to the Frye*. The painting is striking and fun to behold. It looks oddly contemporary. The patchwork of her skirt matches the pastoralist upcycled clothes of eco-conscious designers today. The cape is something that might have come from Commes. Um, those are Ugg boots. But most of the action is in the sloping lips, burning cheeks, and steely upturned expression. She's a tough, beautiful woman, with slightly greasy hair. She's protecting the version of the city that looks like the country.

*The story of how it got here, from the Frye: "Sainte Genevieve was included in the traveling exhibition Illusions of Reality: Naturalist Painting, Photography, and Cinema 1875–1918, which was presented at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, October 8, 2010 to January 16, 2011. It was their first retrospective exhibition on Naturalism. After Amsterdam, the exhibition was presented at the Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery of Art in Helsinki from February 17 to May 15, 2011. Prior to the Illusions of Reality exhibition the painting had been on loan—from the same owner as now—to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia since 2005. The owner knew that the Academy did not wish to renew their long-term loan when the painting was going to return from Helsinki so the owner approached the Frye in early 2011 with the offer of a long-term loan, before Illusions of Reality was over.