During the nineteenth century, paintings depicting ‘real’ life of ordinary people became increasingly popular, first in what has become known as social realism, pioneered by Jean-François Millet, then Naturalism, championed by Jules Bastien-Lepage until his untimely death in 1884. Among other themes, these put the case for the rural poor, and the desperate poverty that those living in the country had to endure.

Look carefully at many of their paintings, though, and the underlying stories aren’t as simple. One of the most evident problems is that many of those campaigning paintings used models who had been carefully posed. Look at their hands, feet and hair and you’ll often see someone who appears remarkably clean and kempt with no evidence of prolonged and arduous manual labour, even clothes that lack the dirt and mud so typical of those who work and walk on unpaved tracks and ploughed fields.

At the same time, photographic portraits of the poor became popular among some who sought to advance the art of photography. There are some notorious examples of early photographers who were caught posing carefully selected models in deliberately misleading circumstances, demonstrating how the camera can be made to lie.

My small selection of paintings of country people from the nineteenth century is an attempt to show some that appear most faithful records that weren’t intended to support political views or attract praise at a Salon.

Jules Breton had been born and brought up in the rural village of Courrières, and returned there to paint intimate portraits of those who continued to live there, including this Young Girl Knitting, seen in 1860. Many of these intimate works were sold to private collectors and have never been seen at exhibition.

His portrait of this Mother Feeding her Baby from 1863 shows her wearing clogs, and clothing that has seen better days. She is feeding a very young baby in front of a frugal fire in what can only be her normal domestic conditions.

Jean-François Millet had been born in the village of Gruchy, and was the first child of a farming family. Although his portrait of A Norman Milkmaid at Gréville from 1871 lacks fine detail to reinforce its authenticity, she’s clearly grubby and wasn’t painted in the studio.

Max Liebermann’s The Preserve Makers from 1879 shows a shed full of country women preparing foodstuffs for bottling and canning; the latter gradually came into use after 1810, but didn’t become popular until the First World War. This shows well the light factory work that was introduced to country areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the women who provided its labour force.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s An Accident from 1879 is an exception among these, in that it was not only submitted to the Salon of 1880, but won the artist a first-class medal. It was also supposedly painted from memory, showing an incident that the artist witnessed with a medical friend who was similarly called to assist with an injury.

Despite that, it shows a country doctor cleaning and bandaging the injured hand of a boy, as the rest of the extended family looks on. Conditions appear primitive: the small bowl of water is heavily blood-stained, and the cloth by it looks filthy. It’s also rich in detail that appears authentic, from the boy’s shoe compared with that of the doctor, to the bald man standing in front of a treasured grandfather clock in the right background.

Of Bastien-Lepage’s many portraits of country people, his Nothing Doing from 1882 appears the most convincing. From his unlaced mud-caked boots to his filthy and frayed waistcoat, this young agricultural worker looks the part. Bastien had spent his childhood in the village of Damvillers, although he was the son of a local artist. He frequently returned to his home village to paint local characters, such as this boy.

The young woman in Breton’s Song of the Lark (1884) has detailed features that appear true to life, in her bare feet with grubby and battered toenails, and hands that have seen hard work with the hook she holds.

Évariste Carpentier had been born into a farming family near the small town of Kuurne in Belgium. The Turnip Washer from 1890 is among the last of his thoroughly Naturalist paintings. Alongside the farmyard birds, two figures are busy washing piles of turnips in a small and dirty pond.

Throughout the career of Léon Augustin Lhermitte he painted the working lives of farmworkers and country people. In his pastel of The Farmworkers’ Supper from 1913, he shows those who have been working outdoors during the long day enjoying a meal at its end.

Together these paintings build a dispassionate image of a countryside that might have been lacking in worldly goods, but was hardly starved and pestilent. And, as I’ll show in the next and concluding article, at times rural life could still be idyllic.

This second article considering the reading of knitting and crochet in paintings concludes with its most frequent use, as a sign of the peasant and poverty. This first became prominent in the social realist paintings of the mid-nineteenth century, starting with those of Jean-François Millet.

Millet’s pastel of The Knitting Shepherdess (1856-57) continued his established pastoral theme, showing a young woman engaged in knitting as her flock grazed in broken woodland behind her. In common with other occupations that left the hands free, shepherdesses commonly knitted for their family while they were at work.

A few years later, Millet revisited the theme in his Young Girl Watching her Sheep from about 1860-62. She is knitting in the round with several needles, to produce a long stocking or sleeve.

Young Girl Knitting (1860) is the second painting Jules Breton made of a young woman from his home village of Courrières knitting indoors. Many of his more intimate works like this were sold to private collectors and have never been exhibited.

Breton’s A Peasant Girl Knitting (c 1870) was probably started, if not completed, en plein air in an old orchard near Douarnenez, where the artist and his family often spent their summers. Note that she’s not even wearing clogs, but her feet are bare.

LA Ring’s Smallholders in the village of Ring from 1887 shows a working class couple who lived in the artist’s home village. ‘Polish Niels’ made his living as the village plumber, and supplemented those earnings by selling seeds. He is here making paper bags in which to sell his seeds, as his wife is engaged in knitting, once again in the round.

The Canadian artist Clarence Gagnon’s Brittany Goose Girl from 1908 walks along in her wooden clogs quietly knitting in the golden sunlight of autumn.

When the American painter Winslow Homer lived in the fishing village of Cullercoats on the north-east coast of England in the early 1880s, much of his time was spent painting among the fishlasses and fishwives while their menfolk were at sea. During that time, the women continued with their supporting tasks of knitting and repairing clothing, and repairing nets and gear, as in his charcoal and chalk drawing of Fisher Girls on Shore, Tynemouth from 1884. Rather than wearing wooden clogs, these two have working boots.

One of Henry Herbert La Thangue’s earliest major paintings is this view of The Boat Builder’s Yard, Cancale, Brittany painted in 1881, when he was staying on the Brittany coast. The young Breton woman shown appears out of place, with her working dress, clogs and knitting. She’s surrounded by the tools of and shavings from boat-building in wood. Behind her is the frame of a part-constructed fishing boat similar to those seen in the background at the right, a working boat known as a chaloupe thonière.

These two articles are dedicated to my editor-in-chief, the most prolific knitter I have known, my wife, in thanks for all her support, and technical advice.

For those working the land to grow crops, the start of the year was after the harvest was complete, when the first cooler days of autumn came in, before rain turned the fields and tracks to mud, and the winter’s frosts began. This was the time to start preparing arable fields for the growing season next year, with their first ploughing.

Robert Bevan’s The Turn Rice-Plough, Sussex from about 1909 shows two ploughmen turning a plough in a field in the south-east of England. Its title is probably a simple error for turnwrest, a dialect name used in Kent and Sussex to describe any type of one-way plough that needed to be turned at the end of a furrow as shown here.

Depending on the soil, weather and intended crop, this could be the first of more than five sessions with the plough, before the seed could be sown.

Pastures by rivers were often encouraged to flood during the winter, particularly in the month of February Fill Dyke as shown so well in Benjamin Williams Leader’s painting of country near Worcester in 1881. This both improved soil fertility and kept weeds at bay.

Jean-François Millet revisited his successful painting of a sower from fifteen years earlier in two pastel paintings with the same title, The Sower, from around 1865. In the distance to the right are two horses drawing a spike harrow, used following ploughing to prepare the surface of the earth for seed.

Once the young plants were growing vigorously, all that remained for the growing season was to keep them free from weeds, a laborious and back-breaking task commonly assigned to women.

Jules Breton’s The Weeders from 1868 is set in the fields just outside his home village of Courrières, where these labourers are pulling up thistles and other weeds until the moment the light becomes insufficient for them to work any longer.

Farmers with sheep or cattle usually timed the arrival of the lambs and calves for the spring, to give the young animals as much benefit as possible from the fine weather of the summer.

Rosa Bonheur’s Weaning the Calves (1879) is set in a glorious summer Alpine or Pyrenean landscape, with a dry stone herdsman’s hut at the left, where the menfolk lived while they were away from their families during the summer transhumance to upland grazing.

Anton Mauve’s Return of the Flock (1886-7) shows a small flock of unshorn ewes with young lambs, on the move in the late Spring or early summer.

In some cattle areas at least, once the Spring lambs and calves had been safely delivered into the care of their mothers, couples took the opportunity to get married, as confirmed by analyses of English parish registers. For those growing crops, though, there was little respite during the growing season, when fields had to be kept free of weeds before harvest.

By the end of the Spring or early summer, sheep and cattle were moved to summer grazing to allow the grass in hay meadows to grow ready for mowing during July or August, depending on the latitude and weather.

Mykola Pymonenko’s undated Haymaking shows women in Ukraine raking in the harvest to be transported by a hay wain drawn by a pair of oxen.

Samuel Palmer’s Shearers from about 1833-35 shows the seasonal work of a shearing gang, relieving these adult sheep of their fleece before the weather became too hot.

Meanwhile, the summer’s grain crop ripened and was ready for harvest.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Harvesters from 1565 includes most of the outdoor stages from cutting the grain using scythes to transporting the harvest by cart for threshing.

Once the harvest was home, demands on the arable farmer eased, and some English parish records show a peak of marriages during the early autumn in areas predominantly farming sheep and grain. This was also the time for the harvest of fruit such as apples.

Camille Pissarro’s overtly Divisionist painting of Apple Picking, Éragny, was largely completed during the autumn of 1887.

This decisive phase of the year is shown well in Evelyn De Morgan’s Cadence of Autumn from 1905, here centred on the fruit harvest. Five women are shown in a frieze, against a rustic background. From the left, one holds a basket of grapes and other fruit, two are putting marrows, apples, pears and other fruit into a large net bag, held between them. The fourth crouches down from a seated position, her hands grasping leaves, and the last is stood, letting the wind blow leaves out from each hand. They wear loose robes coloured in accordance with their phases in the season.

The landscape behind them contains a watermill and surrounding buildings. At the left, the trees are heavy with fruit and the fields either green or ripe corn. At the right, the trees are barren, and the landscape hilly and more wintry. Soft blue-white patches of mist are visible in the foreground on the right. The passing of the season, and the fruit harvest, progresses in time from the left to the right.

By that time, the first fields were being ploughed in preparation for the following year.

Before the nineteenth century, when many farms either concentrated on sheep and arable, or on the raising of cattle, their economies were contrasting. The arable farmer was committed to labour-intensive work and investment throughout the year, with any cash return occurring once the harvest had been sold. Livestock farmers had lower labour requirements for much of the year, with their peak demand during Spring calving, and could spread the sale of animals more evenly over the year, with more immediate returns on their investment. This also enabled those involved in livestock farming to have more free time to engage in crafts and other sidelines.

One important staple crop has been largely forgotten from both agricultural and rural history: the humble potato. First imported from South America to Europe in the latter half of the sixteenth century, for the first couple of centuries it was considered exotic eating. It quietly became increasingly important during the eighteenth century, and is now widely credited as the food that enabled the population boom in much of Europe in the nineteenth century.

For several years from 1845, a fungus-like organism late blight caused widespread crop failure in the poorer parts of Ireland, Scotland and elsewhere, causing the Great Irish Famine, with at least a million dying from starvation.

The potato is unusual for storing large amounts of starch in its tuber. Although starch is only about one fifth of the potato by weight, the remainder being water, it came be the staple food for much of the working population, in both country and city. Overton has calculated using estimated crop yields from the early nineteenth century that an acre of potatoes would have provided about 2.5 times as many calories as an acre of wheat.

Like wheat, growing potatoes is a process of amplification. Tubers from the previous crop are sown in the ground, and multiply to yield many times the weight originally sown. Production is thus not dependent on conventional seed, but on seed potatoes with a more limited life. If a whole crop is destroyed by blight, not only is there nothing to eat that year, but the seed potatoes for the following year are also lost. Blight remains in the soil, and once affected that land has to be used for crops other than potatoes.

However, potatoes had other advantages in a war-torn and taxed Europe. While troops rampaging in foreign countryside would often raid or burn fields of grain, damaging or stealing potatoes proved more resistant to invaders. They were also likely to escape taxes or charges levied on other arable crops.

During the eighteenth century, labourers fortunate enough to have a little land they could farm for themselves started to grow potatoes, to supplement their limited diet. Small potato patches sprung up in the countryside, and around towns. Production at scale remained unusual until the following century, when some English counties including Lancashire and Middlesex devoted significant areas to supply the growing cities. That in turn depended on transport such as canals and then railways to deliver sacks of potatoes to urban consumers.

When Vincent van Gogh was living in Borinage in Belgium, he was among labourers whose staple food was potatoes, in one of the areas that had grown them for longer than most. His Still Life with Potatoes, painted in September 1885, is his tribute to the humble vegetable.

Potato production was painted extensively by social realists including Jean-François Millet, in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Millet shows this back-breaking work in his Potato Planters from about 1861.

The Potato Harvest from 1855 is another more substantial work developed from Millet’s drawings. In the foreground, a man and woman are working together to fill sacks with the harvested potatoes, to be loaded onto the wagon behind them. The other four work as a team to lift the potatoes using forks and transfer them into wicker baskets, a gruelling task. Although the fields in the left distance are lit by sunshine, the dark scud-clouds of a heavy shower fill the sky at the right. Being poor, none of the workers has any wet-weather gear. The soil is also poor, full of stones, and yields would have been low despite the full sacks shown at the right.

Millet’s most famous single work, The Angelus, was completed around 1857-59. This had been commissioned by the American collector Thomas Gold Appleton, as Prayer for the Potato Crop, but underwent modification before Millet renamed it. At some stage, it’s thought to have included a child’s coffin, but that was overpainted.

It shows a couple, praying the Angelus devotion normally said at six o’clock in the evening, over the potatoes they have been harvesting. It’s dusk, and as the last light of the day fades in the sky, the bell in the distant church is ringing to mark the end of work, and the start of the evening. Next to the man is the fork he has been using to lift potatoes from the poor, stony soil; his wife has been collecting them in a wicker basket, now resting at her feet. Behind them is a basic wheelbarrow with a couple of sacks of potatoes on it, ready to be taken home.

Twenty years later, Jules Bastien-Lepage painted what’s now sometimes known as October or Potato Gatherers (1878), but was originally shown as October: Potato Gatherers.

Vincent van Gogh painted Woman Lifting Potatoes (1885) and similar scenes during his time living with his parents in Nuenen, in North Brabant, the Netherlands.

János Pentelei Molnár’s The Potato Harvest from 1901 takes this theme into the early years of the twentieth century, in Hungary.

Laurits Andersen Ring’s A Man Digging Potatoes from 1901 is pure social realism, as this smallholder uses his spade to lift the potatoes that are his staple diet. I believe that the plants shown here have suffered from potato blight, which also swept Europe periodically causing more famine and death.

Although the girls shown in Léon Frédéric’s Three Sisters from 1896 are clean and well dressed, they’re sat together peeling their staple diet of potatoes in a plain and barren farmhouse. A glimpse of the shoes of the girl at the left confirms that they’re neither destitute nor affluent.

Vincent van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (1885) is another revealing insight into the lives of poor labourers in Nuenen, who are about to feast on a large dish of potatoes under the light of an oil lamp.

Émile Friant’s The Frugal Meal (1894) continues the social theme, as a poor family with four daughters sits down to a meal consisting of a bowl piled high with potatoes, and nothing else. More worryingly, the pot on the floor at the left is empty.

Further reading

Christopher Shepherd’s brilliant essay on the history of the potato in The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History (2024), ed. Jeannie Whayne, Oxford UP, ISBN 978 0 19 092416 4.

In the more northerly latitudes, grass that’s essential for cattle to graze grows little during the winter months. Farmers keeping cattle therefore have to provide alternative feed for their livestock for several months each year. This can include root crops such as brassica varieties including turnips and swedes (also known as rutabaga), but the most widespread is cut and dried grass as hay.

Where climate and day-length are suitable, as in much of England and France, dedicated hay meadows can provide two harvests each year. Left ungrazed through the winter, the first is normally ready to mow in the late Spring, and when there’s sufficient rainfall during the early summer, a second hay harvest can be obtained before the weather deteriorates in the early autumn. The mowing of hay has also been known as math, and mowing a second time is thus the aftermath or lattermath.

The essential requirement for hay is that it’s dried thoroughly, or it will rot over time and become unusable as fodder. In the centuries before mechanisation during the nineteenth century, this process was described as: first mow the grass, “scatter it about, gather it in windrows, cock it overnight, scatter it about, windrow it, cock it, and so on to the stack and stack it”. (Fussell) Those steps are shown well in paintings.

The companion to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting of the grain harvest, The Hay Harvest from 1565 shows all stages in progress. In the left foreground a man is beating the blade on his scythe to sharpen it ready for mowing. Three women are striding towards him with the rakes they use to scatter and gather the mown hay. Behind them, in the valley, others are gathering the hay into small stacks or cocks, where it continues to dry before being loaded onto the hay wagon to be taken back to the farm.

At the right are wicker baskets containing other crops, including what appear to be peas or beans, together with a red fruit.

Ferdinand Hodler’s marvellous Mower from about 1898 is seen sharpening the blade on his heavy scythe using a whetstone, as the sun rises behind and to the left.

The couple in Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Haymakers from 1877 are enjoying a short break from their labours, with the mown hay behind them still scattered to dry, before it can be raked into cocks.

Henri-Jean Martin painted Summer, or Mowers in 1903, as mechanisation was spreading across Europe. Several small clusters of men are mowing the hay in this meadow with their scythes, as three young women are dancing in a ring on the bed of flowers, and another sits nursing an infant.

Henry Moret’s Haymaking in Brittany from 1906 shows a smaller team busy mowing and raking on steeper ground.

In Camille Pissarro’s Divisionist painting of Haymaking, Éragny from the summer of 1887, a team of women are raking the cocks into haystacks.

Women in this hay meadow in Ukraine are raking in the harvest to be transported by a hay wain drawn by a pair of oxen, as painted in Mykola Pymonenko’s undated Haymaking.

In Jean-François Millet’s Haystacks: Autumn from about 1874, the harvest has been gathered, and three huge haystacks dominate the canvas. At the foot of one of them, a shepherd leans on his staff, resting from his labours as his flock grazes on the stubble.

Surplus hay was also a good cash crop for those who could get it transported to towns and cities. Along the east coast of England, barges were filled with hay then taken to London for sale. Much of the land in the county of Middlesex, to the west of London, was devoted to producing hay to feed horses in the city.

Robert Bevan’s painting of Hay Carts, Cumberland Market from 1915 is a view of London’s last hay market, near to the artist’s studio. By this time, the bales shown were made by mechanical baling machines and brought to London by barge.

In the next article in this series, I’ll look at a novel crop that soon became the staple food for many, the potato.

Modern domestic cattle originated during the Stone Age from the aurochs, in the Fertile Crescent. Although they remained in Europe until they became extinct in the seventeenth century, aurochs were never domesticated, and few farmers would have known of their existence.

Cattle go under a bewildering variety of English names: cows are females, usually kept for their milk; an ox, plural oxen, can be a generic term for both males and females, or applied more strictly to castrated males commonly used for drawing carts and ploughs; bulls are males used for breeding; steers are young males, often castrated and reared for their meat; finally, bullocks were originally young males, but are now assumed to have been castrated.

Cattle have been bred and raised as draught animals, often seeing wider use than horses, particularly when power is required rather than speed, for their meat, milk and hide. As herbivores, their dung also makes good fertiliser.

One of Paulus Potter’s last paintings, Cows Grazing at a Farm from 1653, shows half a dozen cattle, typical for many small farms of the time, including those primarily working a sheep-corn system for cereal production.

Just as sheep were associated more with arable farming, cattle were often grazed on land unsuitable for crops, including open woodlands, as shown in Rosa Bonheur’s A Herdsman with his Flock from 1852. In some areas, particularly before the enclosures of the eighteenth century and later, these small herds grazed on common land that was shared by locals or all-comers.

Until the advent of the milking machine in the early twentieth century, milking of all domestic animals used as sources of milk could only be performed by hand, wherever the animals might be. Most cows were milked where they were grazing, and for much of the year that required the milkmaid (this being almost exclusively the task of women) to start work in the fields at first light.

Adriaen van de Velde’s undated Milkmaid with Cow and Goats in Front of a Barn is a farmyard delight, with the cow being milked looking directly at the viewer.

Jean-François Millet’s Woman Milking a Cow (1854-60) shows one of this secret army of milkmaids working on location as usual.

Alfred Roll’s full length portrait of Manda Lamétrie, Farmer from 1887 is a Naturalist depiction of a working woman farmer who has just milked the cow behind her. Although she’s far too clean and tidy, it’s of historical interest in that her pail is modern and manufactured from metal.

In the harsher winters of northern Europe, cattle were usually brought in to shelter from the worst of the weather, which would otherwise reduce the milk yield of cows. This allowed the milkmaid to share their shelter.

Gerard ter Borch put the milkmaid and her cow at the centre of this painting, A Maid Milking a Cow in a Barn from about 1652-54. As was universal at that time, milk was collected in a wooden bucket that would have been scrubbed thoroughly before use, but fell far short of modern standards of hygiene.

Cow’s milk wasn’t bottled until the end of the nineteenth century, when processing such as pasteurisation was also introduced. Until then, milk sold in towns and cities often came fresh from the cow.

George Morland’s painting of St. James’s Park from 1788-90 shows a military family together in what’s now a central London park, but was at that time still quite rural, with a cow being milked at the left. This appears to have been a common sight until well into the nineteenth century.

Milk was also transformed into foods such as cheese, as a means of preserving its nutritional value long after the milk would have become sour and inedible. Small-scale cheese production has been widespread throughout the world since long before historical records began. Processing methods have been varied, resulting in innumerable local varieties of cheese that are distinctive of their areas of origin. Milk has also been processed into curds, butter, cream and yogurt.

One great benefit of milking cows was exposure to cowpox, a mild viral illness that provided immunity against its mutilating and often deadly relative smallpox. In 1796, the British physician Edward Jenner made the association between the two diseases, leading to the introduction of vaccination using cowpox virus, and the eventual eradication of smallpox in 1980, long after the eradication of the milkmaids who had made it all possible.

Constant Troyon’s Oxen Going to Work from 1855 shows teams of oxen being driven off to be hitched up to carts or ploughs in draught.

From the end of the Middle Ages, farms started to specialise in breeding cattle for their meat. Across Europe, tracks and later roads developed for crews of itinerant drovers to drive herds to market, where they were sold for slaughter, to yield beef, and their hides were processed into leather.

Sidney Richard Percy’s On the Road to Loch Turret, Crieff (1868) shows a few cattle watering close to this drover’s road near the market town of Crieff in Scotland. Cattle were driven here from rough grazing to the north, and some were sold in Crieff to be driven south through England to the pastures of Norfolk, where they were fattened before walking onward to London, to become roast beef for diners there. Few Londoners would have realised how many hundreds of miles their dinner had walked to reach its plate.

Next week I’ll look at the second favourite food of cattle, hay.

So far in this series, I have concentrated on the production of staple cereals such as wheat and rye. The fundamental aim of that arable farming is simply to multiply the number of grains of cereal, so that for each seed sown there are more harvested and delivered as food. Example figures given by Mark Overton for a typical English farm in the early sixteenth century suggest a gross wheat yield of 8-12 bushels per acre (forgive the antiquated units!), for a fixed cost in seed of 2.5 bushels per acre, giving net yields of 5.5-9.5 bushels per acre. By 1854, net yield of wheat had risen to 30 bushels per acre.

Early arable farmers realised that soil quality was key to the efficiency of this process. When seed is sown in soil of high fertility, then harvest yield will be higher. Thin soils were easiest to cultivate but also the quickest to lose their fertility, so farmers had to develop methods for increasing soil fertility to compensate. Among those discovered to be beneficial were:

• ‘resting’ the soil by leaving it fallow and uncultivated;
• growing a nitrogen-fixing crop such as clover or legumes (peas or beans);
• applying fertiliser such as dung.

The first two resulted in systems of crop rotation, a subject I’ll cover in the future. This article looks at one of the most popular methods for delivering fertiliser in the form of animal dung, using sheep, the best mobile source available in much of Europe at the time.

Sheep have other value as farm livestock, providing meat, milk and fleeces, but those were limited relative their value as fertilisers of the soil. During the day, sheep both graze and deposit dung and urine on the ground; at night they stop grazing, but continue to drop dung and urine. Daytime dung therefore fertilises their grazing pastures, while that of the night can be used to fertilise the soil used to grow cereals. The value of the latter was so great that many landowners controlled its rights, known as folding rights, to benefit their own land with sheep dung rather than the soil of their tenants.

Jean-François Millet’s Shepherd Tending His Flock shows thin and scrawny sheep feeding on the stubble left after harvest, common practice in areas with lighter soils where sheep-corn farming became popular.

Anton Mauve’s Return of the Flock (1886-7) shows a small flock of unshorn ewes with young lambs, in the late Spring or early summer, possibly on the move to or from folding.

This engraving by Welby Sherman from one of Samuel Palmer’s sketches in his Shoreham sketchbooks, Evening (1834), shows a small flock in a fold at night, where they’re fertilising the soil as the shepherd dozes behind them.

The most famous of Millet’s few nocturnes, The Sheepfold, Moonlight from 1856-60, shows a shepherd working his dogs to bring his flock into a fold or pen on the plain near Barbizon. He is doing this under a waning gibbous moon lighting the backs of the sheep.

Strangely, folding of sheep as a mobile source of dung as fertiliser was widely practised across England, but almost unknown in the Low Countries including the Netherlands. As a practice it could compromise the value of sheep for other purposes. Those grazing on rolling chalk downs in daytime might have to walk several miles each day to drop their dung overnight in arable fields in the valley, and return, so fattening less for slaughter.

Sheep could also be driven longer distances to market, as shown in Constant Troyon’s On the Way to Market from 1859.

Heinrich Bürkel’s Shepherds in the Roman Campagna from 1837 has an almost documentary quality, in the rough and dusty peasants slumped on their horses and donkeys. In the foreground a couple of ewes are looking up at their lambs being carried in a pannier, and a dog is challenging a snake by the roadside.

In areas where domestic animals moved between highland pastures for the summer, and lowland grazing for the winter, including much of Spain, sheep could cover great distances each year in the transhumance.

Realising the value of their fleeces required annual shearing by hand.

The Shearers (c 1833-35) is the most ambitious of Samuel Palmer’s works from his period at Shoreham. This shows the seasonal work of a shearing gang, in a sophisticated composition drawing the gaze to the brilliant and more distant view beyond. The curious collection of tools to the right was the subject of preparatory sketches, and seems to have been carefully composed. However they have defied any symbolic interpretation, and may just ‘look right’.

Millet’s Sheep Shearing from about 1854 shows the highly skilled task of hand-shearing the fleece from a sheep. A man holds the animal still, resting over the end of a large barrel. A woman is using hand shears to cut the fleece from the sheep, as was universal before the introduction of machine shearing from 1888. Even with highly skilled hands, this is a difficult process, and it’s hard to remove the complete fleece. In some parts of the world, itinerant shearing teams would have performed this task, but for small flocks on poor farms it had to be carried out by those working the farm.

Fleeces generated the wool trade, centred on towns and cities that grew rich from the proceeds of wool and its weaving into fabrics. Ports specialising in the import and export of wool flourished around the coasts of Europe, and prosperous and powerful families made their fortunes from fleeces sheared on farms hundreds or even thousand of miles away.

In this period, one of the natural predators of sheep, the Eurasian wolf, was hunted to extinction in much of Western Europe. Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s The Good Shepherd from 1616 shows a shepherd being attacked by a wolf, as he tries to save his flock, which are running in panic into the nearby wood.

Other parts of the British Isles saw rural areas stripped of their human, farming populations, only to be replaced by sheep. William Watson’s Highland Wanderers – Morning Glen Croe, Argyllshire (1906) shows a valley in the middle of the Arrochar ‘Alps’, an exceptionally rugged mountainous area of the Cowal Peninsula, to the north-west of Loch Lomond in Scotland. By this time, the Highland Clearances had driven most of the human population into the cities further south, or to flee overseas as migrants.

Next week I’ll conclude this account in paintings of arable farming by considering cash crops, such as flax and madder.