A Rems Valley Pastoral
Standstill With Sheep

The earliest extant depictions of sheep are murals stemming from ancient times. Ever since they were discovered during the Renaissance, sheep have become a staple in landscape paintings. In baroque, rococo, classicist, and romantic paintings, sheep were part of the (in)action. If you wanted to depict an idyllic landscape, you added sheep. This is called a pastoral. The beholder is calmed by the sight of sheep standing still and gazing dreamily into a valley. A shared sense of well-being washes over the viewer as lambs nibble blissfully on blades of grass. Caspar David Friedrich was well aware of this calming effect. In his 1822 “Village Landscape in Morning Light” (better known as “Der einsame Baum” (The Lonely Tree), which hangs in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin), he masterfully added a wee flock of sheep — even though they’re just barely visible grazing in the shade. But modernism subsequently banned sheep from the canvas and declared that the age of idealized landscapes celebrating the supposed simplicity of rural life was over. Now, however, it is high time for a revival of woolly pastorals, says the author of this piece, who lives in Washington, D.C., and assembled the following photo gallery between 2020 and 2022. On every trip home to Germany, she revisits the subjects of her portraits at least once in their pasture in Schorndorf, a Swabian village in the Rems Valley. As a musical accompaniment, she recommends Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 15 in D major, Op. 28, “Pastoral,” ideally the Emil Gilels rendition.