Perhaps no artist more epitomized the canons of pompier art than W. A. Bouguereau. He was a regular exhibitor at the Paris Salon and by the time he painted The Water Girl in 1885 his reputation as an artist had been firmly established. His paintings frequently depicted children and shepherdesses and it was through that these sentimental subjects that he chose to extol the virtues of labor, purity and hope. As in The Water Girl the models were often 'idealized' beauties whose tender expressions were rendered with an almost photographic realism. Bouguereau was known to be an admirer of Classical statuary and Renaissance painting, and his compositions combined a balance of sculptural form with a subltle modulation of color. Bouguereau enjoyed the patronage of many Americans and, therefore, it is not surprising that the earliest provenance of The Water Girl lists its being in a New York Collection. The picture is very similar to another painting of the same year, Jeune Fille portant une cruche (William-Adolphe Bouguereau: L'Art Pompier, New York, Borghi & Co., exh. cat., 1991, p. 46 and 47, illustrated) that was also sold to an American collector and which shows the same model and jug set against a slightly different background.