Charles-Émile Jacque

A shepherd and her sheep have arrived at the edge of the forest. A black sheepdog sits in front of her, waiting for the shepherd's instructions.
The high contrast between light and dark created by the sunlight filtering through the trees brings the image to life. The lamb in the foreground is perhaps the most radiant of all.In Western art, lambs are often a symbol of Jesus Christ in his role as the sacrifice for mankind, so the shepherdess could easily be seen as the Virgin Mary.
From around 1830, many painters who loved pastoral landscapes, including Corot and Millet, gathered in the village of Barbizon, about 60 kilometers south of Paris, and they In Japan, the Italian Fontanesi, who was a foreign employee of the government in the early Meiji period, was a painter of this style, and Millet's works have been familiar to us since early times, with the sketchbook of Takahashi Yuichi, known as the father of modern Western painting, including copies of Millet's works.were later collectively known as the Barbizon School.