The scene is familiar enough, but this painting goes too far. The girl is treating her bird as if it were an ancient hero laid out on a bier. She has concocted an animal version of classical soldier's death, something out of Hommer or Racine. She has very poetically draped the bird's cage with ivy, and artfully arranged its dead body so that the head droops pitifully over the edge. (It makes the bird look like an opera singer who has just been stabbed.) Even the girl's gesture is theatrical, the kind of histrionic pose children tend to pick up from their parents. She does seem to be suffering, but her sadness is modeled on melodrama. Perhaps she has been reading too many romantic poems. (If she were a contemporary girl, we would say she had been reading her older sister's Mills and Boon paperbacks or Harlequin romances.) It's easy to picture the solemn ceremony that will follow: she will dress in full morning, and take the dead bird out to some poetic solitary place under a weeping willow.