(jazzy music)
Female: 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.
Male: 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.
Female: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848,
so this is only four years later, and 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.
Male: 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 light had been captured in an authentic way.
Female: One art historian has said that this painting
is about light, but it's also about a lot of other things, too.
Male: It has such a curious, such a radical composition.
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.
Female: Right. We don't see a shepherd anywhere.
Male: But only on the right side.
They seem to be moving up and down
in this wonderful undulating landscape.
Female: They seem very innocent and very playful.
Male: And curious.
Female: A hint of wondering 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 on plein air,
that is, that he painted it outside.
Male: This is early for plein air painting.
Female: 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.
Male: This particular spot was considered
really picturesque.
It was a tourist location.
It was a place that people visited regularly.
Female: And that artists painted, too.
Male: I think in 1852 when this painting was made,
it had a different kind of significance.
Female: In 1852, we know that there was
particular concern for the safety of Enlgland
from foreign invasion, the safety of the coasts,
from foreign invasion.
Male: 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.
Female: In much more recent memory,
for the Victorians, was Napoleon,
and the Duke of Wellington's defeat of Napoleon.
Male: In fact, the Duke of Wellington was
actively, at this moment, talking about
the vulnerability of the English coasts.
So 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.
Female: The British were not sure what
Anglo-French relations were going to be
with this new Napoleon in power,
so this was definitely a moment where there
was fear for the safety of England.
Male: We can see just to the left, of course,
the English Channel itself, and just across the way,
almost visible, is France.
So there is this sense that that innocence
of those sheep is also about the vulnerability
of the populace of England.
Female: 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.
Male: A little more innocuous from
the French perspective, right?
Female: Right. Not a kind of nationalistic
Our English Coast but a more generic idea
of strayed sheep, which of course has its
own meanings as well.
Male: 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.
Female: 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 and that meant that
perhaps the Church of England wasn't taking care
of its flock particularly well at that time either.
Male: I think for Hunt it was important
that there were multiple possibilities,
and in a sense give this painting a kind of depth
and a kind of power that goes well beyond
the simple landscape.
Female: 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.
Male: 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.
Female: There weren't that many sunny days
to go outside and paint.
Male: That's right.
But I think that reminds us of what it meant,
the kind of commitment to what he was actually seeing.
Female: And that's so different than academic
practice where there were formulas
for representing things instead of taking things
directly observed from nature.
Male: This was meant to be real and honest
and to strip away all of that academic tradition.
Female: It's incredibly tactile.
There's the fir, the sunlight, the vegetation,
even the smell of being near the beach.
For all its moralizing, it's a really sensual image.
(jazzy music)