Statuette "Girl with a hurdy-gurdy"

Louis-Auguste Moreau (1855-1919) was a famous French sculptor. A major master of interior plastics and genre sculpture. At one time, he collaborated with factories for the production of "Viennese bronze", providing them with his models. In the 1820s, impoverished German peasants from Hesse made wooden brooms and sold them in the surrounding towns. It was found that the goods go better when hired girls dance next to the seller to the tune of a hurdy-gurdy. This "innovation" was soon picked up by merchants of other goods. The first "organ-grinder pimps" appeared, who hired girls from poor families and promised their parents to take care of the girls and share their earnings fairly while traveling through European cities. In England, girls were called "Hurdy-Gurdy girls"(hurdy-gurdy girls). Soon "hardy-hardy" crossed the ocean and ended up in America, Australia. Hurdy-gurdy and Hessian girls also reached Russia. In the 1870s, the editor of one of the newspapers of the West praised the activities of "wandering daughters from the sunny shores of the Oder, Elbe, and Rhine": "Most of them were a cheerful escort of cowboys or miners, forcing them to pay for drinks. Not all saloon girls were prostitutes, the last ones were those who stumbled or broke down as a result of deprivation, drug abuse, alcohol and the pangs of conscience."