Our English Coasts, 1852 ('Strayed Sheep')
William Holman Hunt, 1852
For now, just to look at
The photograph we have of this work is not sharp enough to print at the quality we want, so we are not selling it for now. We are looking for a better one.
About the work
- Artist
- William Holman Hunt
- Date
- 1852
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Collection
- Tate (Tate Britain, London)
- Reference
- XDV-4311
What the museum label doesn't tell you
This painting changed its title three times, and each version said something different. At the Royal Academy in 1853 it was Our English Coasts, a seaside view. The frame carried another inscription: The Lost Sheep, a religious parable. In Paris, in 1855, it became Strayed Sheep, plain description. Look at the flock: loose on the cliff edge, no shepherd, no wall, nobody watching the coast. A year earlier Napoleon III had seized power in France, and the Channel had never looked so narrow. Hunt painted this outdoors between August and December, enduring cold in Sussex; the butterflies were added later, in the studio. Delacroix saw it in Paris and praised it in his diary. Landscape, parable, or political warning?
