Angústia

August Schenck was a Dane who trained in Paris and made his name painting animals as if they carried human feeling, which was very much the taste of the 1870s. Here a ewe stands in the snow over her dead lamb, mouth open, while a ring of crows closes in and a thin line of blood runs from the lamb onto the white ground. Nothing is spelled out about who or what this is meant to stand for, and that openness is part of why it travelled. The National Gallery of Victoria bought it in 1880, and Melbourne took to it completely, voting it the most popular work in the whole collection in 1906 and again more than a century later in 2011.