Shepherd Boy on a Grassy Hill

Around 1859 Franz von Lenbach was in his early twenties, a student in Munich still years away from the society portraits that later made him rich. In the city's old masters gallery, the Alte Pinakothek, he had studied Murillo's pictures of Seville street children, down to their dirty bare feet. This small oil on cardboard, unsigned and dated by the museum to around that year, shows a herd boy on a grassy hill. In 1860 Lenbach took up the motif on a canvas more than one and a half metres wide, the Shepherd Boy now in the Schack Collection in Munich. Its buyer, the collector Count Adolf Friedrich von Schack, wrote that one seemed to see and feel the blinding light and scorching heat of the sun, and that Murillo had scarcely painted anything finer. The Lenbachhaus bought this smaller picture in 1950.