Sheep 1904

William Sidney Cooper painted these sheep with oils, maybe sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century, I'd guess. You can imagine him carefully building up the landscape and then, bam, plopping in these woolly creatures. I feel for Cooper, you know? He's out there, trying to capture the light on the hills, the fluffy clouds, the stillness of the flock. Did he keep them still with treats? I would have! Look at the texture he's created on the sheep's wool – short, dabbed strokes that mimic the crimped wool. See how he uses light and shadow to give them form, each one a little lump of softness in the landscape. These sheep remind me of Constable's clouds, or Courbet’s landscapes. It's all connected, this conversation between painters across time. You feel that he is striving for a kind of realness, which, of course, is always a fiction that painting creates.