Shepherd with cows

"Shepherd with Cows," painted on cardboard in 1885 and held by the Museum Folkwang in Essen, connects Busch to the pastoral genre that runs through European painting from Flemish seventeenth-century masters to the Barbizon School he would have encountered through Munich connections. The Museum Folkwang, founded on the democratic principle that great art should be accessible to working people, is an appropriate institutional home for a subject rooted in agricultural labor and the unpretentious rhythms of rural life. By 1885 Busch was in his early fifties and increasingly withdrawn from Munich; his observation of shepherds and their animals would have been drawn from the countryside around Wiedensahl, where he could watch such scenes from daily experience. Cardboard as support gives the pastoral subject an informality consistent with a quick outdoor study or a studio work made in the spirit of direct observation rather than exhibition ambition.

On cardboard, the pastoral subject is handled with the directness Busch brought to all his informal works; animals in landscape present specific observational challenges — movement, foreshortening, the integration of figure and ground — that Busch resolves with his characteristic economy rather than academic elaboration.