Shepherd and Flock at the Edge of the Forest, Evening

On the evening of 9 November 1872 fire broke out in a warehouse in downtown Boston, and before it was stopped it had burned out some 65 acres of the commercial district. The painter William Morris Hunt lost a great deal in it, many of his own paintings and sketches, and with them five large Millets he had collected in France. This canvas was not among them. Hunt had bought it from Millet around 1853, and in 1874 he sold it through Doll and Richards, the Boston picture dealers. It is a small upright picture, 60 centimetres tall, and the hour is dusk. Tall, thin trunks crowd the left side, black against a band of orange low on the horizon. Pale sheep graze among the roots, and on a rise at the right, by a stretch of fence, the shepherd is only a dark silhouette leaning on his staff, his back to the last of the light.