Startled

Eugene Joseph Verboeckhoven 1799 - 1881

Summary

A sheepdog drives stray sheep off a rocky outcrop toward safer grazing. The dog and the sheep are depicted in great detail, although their movements appear somewhat wooden. The foreground terrain, such the flowering heather and the lichens on the rocks, is also treated in detail, while the background (although a relatively idealised vista of a lake and hills) also contains naturalistic details of interest, such as the smoke rising from a distant hamlet. Verboeckhoven trained at the academy in Ghent, becoming a pupil in 1818 of Balthazar Paul Ommeganck (1725-1826), whose classical landscape style informed his early work. From the mid 1820s, he turned to the naturalistic painting of different breeds of animals, inspired by the work of the great Dutch animal painter Paulus Potter (1625-1654). He was mainly active in Brussels.