Resting Shepherd Boy

A shepherd boy resting on a rock is sleeping lightly. His limbs seem slack: his left arm has sunk down, the right is draped loosely around his crook, his legs are set one in front of the other in a relaxed manner, his head is resting forwards on his chest. This interplay produces many intriguingly different views, and yet the expression of the boy’s dreamy isolation from the out-side world is equally strong from all angles. When the figure was first shown in 1873, it was a huge success by virtue of its seemingly classical serenity, its new-fashioned, generalizing treatment of the human form (without painstaking naturalism), and its outstanding sculptural technique. Conrad Fiedler, a friend of Hildebrand’s, wrote that the latter’s works expressed only what was “purely and genuinely artistic, they are simply true, unfalsified works of art, and that is what separates them from all the rest of contemporary, so-called artistic activity."