I hope this happy painting brings you joy. Does this goat belong to the lady who wears a blue hooded cloak? She's smiling - has she just found her goat that perhaps got out of its pen and wandered up into the wooded hills. The village is below and seen (just for a second) along the left margin of the painting. There is a fence behind the trees at the top of the rise. We might wonder if she's been searching for the animal, because she has some branches in her left hand, as if to lure the goat home.
Some years ago while on retreat in a monastery of nuns, I discovered a small herd of goats milling around on the dirt road I walked each morning. They had evidently gotten out through a hole in the fence. Not wanting to bother the sisters with so mundane a problem, I returned to my hermitage to fetch a box of Cheerios which I knew would do the trick. I simply opened the box, held out a handful and "everyone" came along (like first-graders on a field trip) back through the fence-opening to their pasture, where they were again safe and sound.
When we are children, animals are a source of fascination. Paul Claudel wrote: "Intelligence is nothing without delight." Some people retain their sense of wonder and delight all their lives. Others at some point make animals the enemy, to be abused or even killed. Major opinion: For the life of me, I can't understand killing great animals called, trophies. I find it to be rather appalling really. Pressing animals to extinction is for me, a kind of blasphemy (a God insult), as God, in great imagination and pleasure, created the animals even before creating us.
But here is a woman of gentle-kindness enjoying the company of a goat. Pissarro seems to have enjoyed animals, frequently including them in his scenes: a pony, herds of cows, flocks of sheep and goats, a gaggle of geese, a rafter of white turkeys.
