1878
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Shepherdess is a 1878 by Winslow Homer, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A young woman in a sunbonnet leans against a fence, watching sheep graze in a sunlit field. Her dress is simple, her posture relaxed. Homer painted this during a summer in upstate New York, where he stayed at a friend’s farm. The shepherdess looks playful, almost flirty—odd, since Homer never married and sometimes used boys dressed as girls for models. That little twist makes the scene feel less like a postcard and more like a private joke. If you like this quiet country moment, look up more paintings of *america* from the same era.
Homer spent the summer of 1878 at Mountainsville, New York, where his brother's business partner, Lawson Valentine, had a country place called Houghton Farm. While there he developed pastoral images of shepherdesses. The flirtatious quality of these depictions becomes intriguing when we consider that Homer never married, and that he worked not only from female models but also sometimes from boys in girls' clothing.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910) was an American landscape painter and illustrator, best known for his marine subjects.
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