Ever since the domestication of the sheep well over ten millennia ago, people have been caring for flocks, moving them between pasture, helping care for and protect young lambs, and selecting those to go for meat. With sheep often inhabiting more rugged and remote terrain, the shepherd’s life can be isolated and challenging. Shepherds and their flocks feature in ancient myth and legend in many roles.

Corydon, whose name probably derives from the Greek name for the lark (bird), became a stock name for shepherds in classical literature. The most prominent of several Corydons is a shepherd in Virgil’s bucolic poems the Eclogues, written around 40 BCE, who falls in love with a boy named Alexis, as shown in the right of Paul Sérusier’s painting of The Corydon Shepherd from 1913.

Shepherds have several important roles in Judaeo-Christian religious writings too, appearing in both Old and New Testaments.

Their first appearance is in the story of the brothers Abel and Cain in the Old Testament book of Genesis. They were the first two sons of Adam and Eve, and when they had grown into young adults came into conflict. Cain was the older, and became a ’tiller of the soil’, while his younger brother Abel was a shepherd. Cain became jealous of Abel, whose offerings to the Lord were better received than Cain’s, so took Abel out into one of his fields, where he killed him and buried his body.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s Cain gets on with his Work in the Field after Killing his Brother Abel, from 1896, shows Abel’s flock in the distance, with an eagle flying over them, and the shepherd’s dog pining for his master at the left. Abel’s lifeless face still looks up from his grave, as his murderous brother stares down at him.

Christian teaching and literature is particularly rich with references to shepherds and sheep, often in metaphor and parable. These start with the birth of Christ, and continue throughout his ministry.

In the account of the nativity of Christ in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, verses 8-15, an angel appeared to the shepherds around Bethlehem and announced the nearby birth, as shown in Jules Bastien-Lepage’s The Annunciation to the Shepherds of 1875, where the sheep barely get a look-in, at the left edge, behind the angel.

One of Charles Le Brun’s last paintings is a remarkable depiction of The Adoration of the Shepherds from 1689, the year before his death. Here he achieves a marvellous luminosity not seen in his earlier work, but remains reticent about showing any of their sheep.

Murillo’s The Good Shepherd from about 1660 refers to a metaphor used pervasively in Christian teaching, that of Christ as the good shepherd of his flock of Christians. Unusually, though, the artist depicts Jesus not as an adult but a child, holding a shepherd’s crook in one hand, his other hand stroking the back of a sheep, with the rest of the flock in the distance. The crook transfers symbolically to the crozier brandished by bishops.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s The Good Shepherd from 1616 is even more worldly. A contemporarily-dressed shepherd is being attacked by a wolf, as he tries to save his flock, which are running in panic into the nearby wood.

It’s more unusual to see the Virgin Mary as a shepherdess, but this was a theme which Miguel Cabrera painted in several of his works, including this delightful Divine Shepherdess painted in oil on copper in about 1760. A rather amusing twist is the head of a monster at the extreme right, apparently scaring one of the sheep. There is the inevitable knight flying down to slay it with his fiery sword.

Nicolas Poussin’s elaborately-composed ideal landscapes often feature shepherds and their flocks. His sublime Landscape with a Calm from about 1651 – arguably one of the greatest landscape paintings in the European canon – does so twice, once in its foreground, although technically the figure is a goatherd, and again on the other side of the lake, where disproportionately large sheep mix with a herd of cattle at the water’s edge. Following Poussin’s lead, many landscape painters included shepherds and their flocks in their staffage.

Painting shepherds as an important part of the motif, or even as the theme of a painting, was more unusual until the nineteenth century. When Heinrich Bürkel and other artists left the towns and cities of northern Europe to go and paint in the countryside around Rome, some started to pay more attention to the shepherds as people. Bürkel’s Shepherds in the Roman Campagna from 1837 has an almost documentary quality, in the rough and dusty peasants slumped on their horses and donkeys. In the foreground a couple of ewes are looking up at their lambs being carried in a pannier, and a dog is challenging a snake on the roadside.

The shepherd’s cause was taken up by Jean-François Millet, in pioneering social realist paintings such as his Seated Shepherdess from about 1852. The flock of sheep are formed quite gesturally into a few vague masses, the head of one resting on the low bank on which the shepherdess is seated, just to the left of her right knee.

Millet even painted shepherds and their flocks at night, here in The Sheepfold, Moonlight from 1856-60. This beautiful nocturne shows a shepherd working his dogs to bring his flock into a pen on the plain near Barbizon. He’s doing this under a waning gibbous moon, which lights the backs of the sheep.

His Shepherd Tending His Flock from about 1862 was most probably painted during showery weather, under a wonderfully luminous sky. This older shepherd is fortunate enough to be wearing an old sou’wester-style hat and weatherproof cloak. His sheep look quite thin and scrawny, and are feeding on the stubble left after harvest, implying the painting was set in the early autumn.

For some artists, shepherds remained part of a romantic fantasy.

The great animal painter Rosa Bonheur visited Scotland in 1855, during the final phases of the Highland Clearances, which drove much of the inhabitants away, usually to graft and poverty in the lowland cities, or to emigrate. She avoided getting embroiled in such controversies, and met Queen Victoria, who was already an admirer of her work. Bonheur later developed her sketches and studies into finished paintings, including The Highland Shepherd (1859).

Constant Troyon’s On the Way to Market from the same year does at least have greater veracity as well as its outstanding backlighting. Once again, young lambs are looking out from the panniers on a donkey.

By the time that Pissarro came to paint his flocks of sheep in some of the few Impressionist paintings which reflected on the social problems of rural France, the shepherds were walking away into the distance.

Now most have gone, replaced by twenty-first century cowboys riding their quadbikes on the hillsides.