The Hireling Shepherd

Hunt painted this in 1851, when he and his Pre-Raphaelite friends were insisting that everything be studied from the real thing, out of doors, in true daylight. So the wheat, the hedgerow, the heavy afternoon light, all of it was worked up from close observation of an actual English field. But nothing here is only itself. A shepherd has abandoned his flock to flirt with a country girl, and the sheep are already straying into the corn where they could sicken. In his hand he holds up a death's-head moth to impress her, an insect named for the skull-like marking on its back. She toys with a sprig of apple blossom, the old symbol of temptation. Hunt later said the pair stood for clergymen bickering over fine points of doctrine while their real congregations wandered off. The lamb in the girl's lap is being fed green apples, which would make it ill.