Shepherd with His Flock

Jean-Victor Bertin

National Gallery of Art

Sun drenches a landscape with trees, grassy hills, and rocky cliffs in this horizonal painting. In the lower right quadrant of the composition, a person with pale skin and wearing a mauve-purple tunic walks toward us on a wide walkway paved with oversized ochre-yellow blocks. The person, presumably a shepherd, braces a staff over one shoulder, and a flock of more than a dozen sheep and two dogs follow. Two trees with straight trunks and roughly oval-shaped canopies rise along the left edge of the canvas to nearly reach the top corner. Grass-carpeted hills lined with more trees roll back and away toward a trickling stream that winds through the middle distance. Rocky cliffs jutting steeply up are outlined against the pale blue sky beyond. A few brown structures are enclosed by a wall on the top of the cliff. On the left half of the composition, hills continue back to mountains that are hazy blue along the horizon, which comes less than halfway up this composition. A few puffy white clouds bob across the otherwise clear sky.