Upper Bavarian Plain with a Flock of Sheep Returning Home

The panel is 84 centimetres wide and only 33 high, more than two and a half times as wide as it is tall. In the late 1850s Eduard Schleich turned to this stretched landscape format, filling it with moving, atmospheric tones, and these pictures brought him great success at the Munich Kunstverein, the city's art society. His cataloguer, the art historian Siegfried Wichmann, later wrote a study of the extreme rectangle as a format of Munich landscape painting, and described Schleich's aim as setting the eye on the far distance. Here a shepherd drives his flock home across the plain beside a stream. The museum dates the panel only to between about 1860 and 1870. Herds going home recur in Schleich's work, in a forest landscape with a flock and shepherds in the Neue Pinakothek and in an evening landscape with a homecoming herd in Stuttgart. The Lenbachhaus bought this one in 1927.