9781422271810

THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

end, he searched, with Millais, for a suitable location and decided on a field near Ewell in Surrey, which he painted daily, on site, from the beginning of July 1851 to the end of October. The landscape was his principal interest, but before he returned to London with a white area in which he would introduce the figures, he painted the sheep. These were not good or willing sitters and had to be captured and held by servants. The shepherd was a professional model, and the shepherdess a local Ewell girl. There is the inevitable symbolism in the painting of the hireling shepherd neglecting his responsibilities while showing his girlfriend a death’s head moth he has caught (which Hunt used as a representation of superstition).

PLATE 4 The Hireling Shepherd (1851)

William Holman Hunt Oil on canvas, 30 x 42 1 ⁄

2 inches (76.2 x 108 cm)

Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd? Thy sheep be in the corn: And for one blast of thy minikin mouth, Thy sheep shall take no harm.

This quotation from Shakespeare (Edgar’s song in King Lear) accompanied what Hunt intended as a depiction of real peasants in an actual setting to counteract, as he saw it, the baleful influence of the pretty Romanticism that was usually present in pictures of rural life. To that

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