William Holman Hunt, Our English Coasts (“Strayed Sheep”), 1852, oil on canvas, 432 x 584 mm (Tate Britain, London)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:04] That sheep in the foreground looks so happy and so adorable. You can see the light right around his ears. You can almost see his nose twitching. William Holman Hunt painted him so realistically, he seems alive.
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:20] We’re in Tate Britain, and we’re looking at Hunt’s “Our English Coasts,” otherwise known as “Strayed Sheep.” It’s one of the spectacular Pre-Raphaelite paintings.
Dr. Harris: [0:31] The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848. This is only four years later. We see that minute attention to detail that’s so characteristic of the Pre-Raphaelites. That Ruskinian idea of truth to nature, really painting what you see.
Dr. Zucker: [0:47] And Ruskin loved this painting. In a critique, he spoke about the way that this was the first time in painting’s history that the sun’s life had been captured in an authentic way.
Dr. Harris: [0:59] One art historian has said that this painting is about light, but it’s also about a lot of other things too.
Dr. Zucker: [1:04] It’s such a curious and sort of radical composition, because you’ve got the southern English coast where the cliffs dive down to the English Channel, and you’ve got this flock of untended sheep, or seemingly untended sheep.
Dr. Harris: [1:17] Right, we don’t see a shepherd anywhere.
Dr. Zucker: [1:19] But only on the right side, and they seem to be moving up and down in this wonderful undulating landscape.
Dr. Harris: [1:25] They seem very innocent and very playful.
Dr. Zucker: [1:28] And curious.
Dr. Harris: [1:30] Wandering around. One seems to be lost in some vegetation in the foreground and others are lying on the ground enjoying the late afternoon sunshine. We know that Hunt painted this en plein air, that is, that he painted it outside.
Dr. Zucker: [1:44] And this is early for plein air painting.
Dr. Harris: [1:46] Plein air painting was made possible because artists were able for the first time to get oil paint in tubes that made it possible to go outside with your paint and your supplies and paint outside.
Dr. Zucker: [1:56] Now, this particular spot was considered really picturesque, and it was a tourist location. It was a place that people visited regularly.
Dr. Harris: [2:02] And that artists painted, too.
Dr. Zucker: [2:03] But I think in 1852 when this painting was made, it had a different kind of significance.
Dr. Harris: [2:09] In 1852, we know that there was particular concern for the safety of England from foreign invasion, the safety of the coasts from foreign invasion.
Dr. Zucker: [2:19] Well, England has a historical preoccupation with invasion. This is an island nation where the shores had been safe a very long time, but very much tied in, woven into the consciousness of every British citizen is the critical historical moment when the Normans from France invaded England in 1066 and actually landed in Hastings, which is very close to where this painting was made.
Dr. Harris: [2:43] In much more recent memory for the Victorians was Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon.
Dr. Zucker: [2:51] In fact, the Duke of Wellington was actively at this moment talking about the vulnerability of the English coasts. Now, there is a new Napoleonic threat. Now Napoleon III had seized power only the year before in France, and the English were very skittish about this.
Dr. Harris: [3:09] The British were not sure what Anglo-French relations were going to be with this new Napoleon in power. This was definitely a moment where there was fear for the safety of England.
Dr. Zucker: [3:18] Well, we can see just to the left of course the English Channel itself, and just across the way, almost visible, is France. There is the sense that [the] innocence of those sheep is also about the vulnerability of the populace of England.
Dr. Harris: [3:32] No one’s protecting them. No one’s tending them. What’s especially fascinating is that when this painting was exhibited three years later in France at the Universal Exposition in Paris, Hunt changed the name from “Our English Coasts” to “Strayed Sheep.”
Dr. Zucker: [3:47] A little more innocuous from the French perspective, right?
Dr. Harris: [3:50] Not a kind of nationalistic, “Our English Coasts,” but a more generic idea of strayed sheep, which of course has its own meanings as well.
Dr. Zucker: [3:57] “Strayed Sheep” has a Christian reference, the idea of the flock, the idea of the followers of Christ, but maybe not following all that strictly.
Dr. Harris: [4:05] They’re straying from their path. Also, Hunt may have been referring to the way that there were internal conflicts in the Church of England that meant that perhaps the Church of England wasn’t taking care of its flock particularly well at that time either.
Dr. Zucker: [4:18] I think for Hunt it was important that there were multiple possibilities, and in a sense, giv[ing] this painting a kind of depth and a kind of power that goes well beyond the simple landscape.
Dr. Harris: [4:27] We see that Pre-Raphaelite interest in truth to nature, especially in the flowers on the left, where Hunt seems to have painted every single leaf and blade of grass and each petal on every flower.
Dr. Zucker: [4:39] He complained that the weather that summer was just rotten, and in fact didn’t finish this painting until November because there were so many storms.
Dr. Harris: [4:47] There weren’t that many sunny days to go outside and paint.
Dr. Zucker: [4:50] That’s right. I think that reminds us of what it meant, the kind of commitment to what he was actually seeing.
Dr. Harris: [4:57] That’s so different than academic practice, where there were formulas for representing things instead of taking things directly observed from nature.
Dr. Zucker: [5:05] Well, this was meant to be real and honest and to strip away all of that academic tradition.
Dr. Harris: [5:10] It’s incredibly tactile. There’s the fur, the sunlight, the vegetation, even the smell of being near the beach. For all its moralizing, it’s a really sensual image.
[5:23] [music]
A daring composition
View from cliffs, Covehurst Bay
William Holman Hunt’s Our English Coasts (Strayed Sheep) is a remarkably original work of art for 1852. Painted largely out of doors at the “Lover’s Seat” (a scenic outlook) above Covehurst Bay near Hastings on the south coast of England, the scene captures a tranquil spot inhabited only by a flock of sheep. The rather daring composition and the attention to natural detail make this painting unique.
William Holman Hunt, Our English Coasts (Strayed Sheep), 1852, oil on canvas, 43.2 x 58.4 cm (Tate Britain, London)
Hunt captures the beauty of an English summer day. The brightness of the sunlight is interrupted only by the shadows of the clouds they move across the landscape. The sea glitters in the distance on the far left. The cliffs are pushed up to the top of the picture frame, leaving little room for the sky. Most daring, however, is the massing of the sheep on the edge of the cliff on the right side of the painting, creating an asymmetry to the composition.
Detail, William Holman Hunt, Our English Coasts (Strayed Sheep), 1852, oil on canvas, 43.2 x 58.4 cm (Tate Britain, London)
Although there are no people in the landscape, the sheep take on very human characteristics, for example the two sheep at the very edge of the canvas, one of whom lovingly rests his head on the back of the his companion. In the corner just underneath, a black sheep stares malevolently out at the viewer.
Pre-Raphaelite truth to nature
True to the ideals of Pre-Raphaelitism, Hunt painted every flower, bramble and blade of grass with extreme attention to detail. The texture gives the impression that you could reach out feel the uneven clumps of wool on the sheep, and Hunt even pays attention to the red marking, used to differentiate ownership, on each member of the flock. Hunt, who had introduced the Pre-Raphaelites to the ideas of John Ruskin, was perhaps the most faithful follower of Ruskin’s advice to “go to Nature in all singleness of heart.”
Political and moral content
Also following in the tradition of Ruskin is the fact that the painting carries a moral content. The title Our English Coasts related to the fact that at the time of the unguarded state of the many miles of English coastline was a serious topic of discussion at the time. The European revolutions of 1848 had made Britons nervous, and it was as yet unclear what the relationship was to be with France’s new ruler Napoleon III.
William Holman Hunt, The Hireling Shepherd, 1851, oil on canvas, 76.4 × 109.5 cm (Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester)
The selection of a location near Hastings, the landing site of the Norman Invasion of 1066, possibly relates to the last successful invasion of the island in British history. The painting’s subtitle, Strayed Sheep, relates to the more Biblical message of the painting. There is no shepherd tending the flock, some of which are perched perilously close to the edge of the cliff. In this the message relates to the moral of Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd, in which a beautiful woman distracts the shepherd while the flock behind him gets into all kinds of trouble. Interestingly, when Hunt exhibited the painting in France in 1855, the Our English Coasts part of the title was dropped.
Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelites
Hunt was born in London in 1827 and became a student at the Royal Academy School in 1844, where he met Millais. He also became a close friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti when the two bonded over a mutual regard for the work of the poet Keats. He was an important force in the early years of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the subjects and moral content of his paintings frequently reflect his own deeply religious nature.
The English countryside
The realism of Our English Coasts (Strayed Sheep) transports the viewer to the spot. One can feel the breeze off the English Channel, and the heat of the summer sun. The picturesque blend of sheep and landscape typically found in the English countryside are here seamlessly intertwined with the moral message. Hunt has in no way created a replica of an earlier painting (which was the original commission), but a wholly original work of art.
