The Hireling Shepherd [SEP] creator
The Hireling Shepherd
The Hireling Shepherd (1851) is a painting by the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt. It represents a shepherd neglecting his flock in favour of an attractive country girl to whom he shows a death's-head hawkmoth. The meaning of the image has been much debated.
Composition.
Hunt painted the picture when he was living and working in close collaboration with John Everett Millais, who was painting "Ophelia" at the same time near the Hogsmill River near Ewell, Surrey. Both paintings
to a lack of proper moral guidance. This would make the title a Biblical allusion; in the story of the Good Shepherd (in the King James Version), the Good Shepherd is explicitly contrasted with a "hireling" shepherd, who has no care for the sheep [John 10:11-15].
Literary significance.
In 1859 Robert Barnabas Brough published a short story entitled "Calmuck" in Charles Dickens' magazine "Household Words". It was a thinly disguised account of Hunt's experience painting the picture