Luc-Olivier Merson specialized in religious themes at a time when most of his contemporaries favored secular subjects. In this deceptively simple scene, a laborer hurries home from the fields, tipping his hat to a young mother he meets along the way. Only the painting’s title tells us that the woman is the Virgin Mary, who appears not as a sculpture in a roadside shrine but as a living person. Shown here in profile, she has a remote presence and seems to gaze into the far distance. The painting's sense of melancholy is enhanced by traditional iconographic details such as an ax and two overlapping wooden beams in the lower lefthand corner that refer to the cross.