Flock of Sheep (Alternative Title: Sheep on the Cliff)

Jean Ferdinand Chaigneau 1830 - 1906

Summary

A shepherd in a blue smock coat leans on his crook, keeping watch while his flock grazes the sparse grass of a clifftop. The sun, shining through a break in the clouds, illuminates their fleeces and the distant white cliffs. Here, as in his painting Sheep, also at Manchester (inv. 1917.226), Chaigneau channels our gaze toward the shepherd. A black sheep in front of him catches our attention, while diagonals converge on him, created by the line of sheep beside him and, to the right, a path and a white animal (dark grey in the shade) pointing straight at him. Chaigneau trained first in his native city, Bordeaux, before entering the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1847. A versatile artist, in 1854 he won third prize in the coveted Prix de Rome for Paysage historique (in which success depended on producing an idealised landscape according to stringent theoretical conventions) with his version of Lycidas et Méris (églogue de Virgile), before turning to the naturalistic landscape painting for which he is best known. He moved to Barbizon in 1858 and his work is closely associated with that eponymous group of painters, especially with that of Charles Jacque (1813-1894), another animalier, who found equal fame for his painting of sheep. Chaigneau's work is characterised by banal subject matter combined with a powerful pastoralism.