Historic Painting: “The Hireling Shepherd” by William Holman Hunt, 1851.

This startling picture is not only visually arresting, but has a lot of resonance in the modern world. In the picture, a young man, evidently supposed to be keeping his eye on the sheep behind him, is instead making the moves on a young woman. The object in the man’s left hand is a death’s head moth (the kind made famous by the film Silence of the Lambs). Notice the woman’s expression: it’s hard to gauge, but it seems that she’s disgusted at his advances. If she was smiling, this would be a whole different picture, but the expression on her face, although open to interpretation, may be subtly indicating that this kind of thing has happened to her many times, and she’s sick of it. Virtually all women in our society can empathize. The #MeToo movement of 2017-18 was about the nearly universal experience of women being subjected to the unwanted sexual attentions of men. Not much has changed in 170 years.

This painting, called The Hireling Shepherd, caused something of a scandal when it appeared on the London art scene in 1851. Critics of the artist, William Holman Hunt, pilloried him for glorifying “coarse” sexuality, especially among the lower classes. Hunt was controversial at the time. He had founded a new artistic movement, the Pre-Rahphaelites, which emphasized exactly the kind of rich, realistic detail you see in this picture, especially when applied to nature. Art history is not really my bailiwick, so I’m a little hazy on the tenets of Pre-Raphaelism. But this is definitely a vivid picture, and one can see how it would ruffle some patrician feathers in mid-Victorian England.