Counting the Flock

Painted on canvas in 1852 and held at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Counting the Flock belongs to a phase of David Cox's career when pastoral scenes of shepherds and livestock had become central to his vision of the English countryside as a place of timeless labour. Cox had long admired the work of Richard Wilson and John Constable, both of whom treated rural workers not as picturesque accessories but as figures whose activity gave moral weight to landscape. By the early 1850s the enclosure of common land and the disruption brought by railway construction made such scenes carry an elegiac quality for audiences who could sense the old agrarian world receding. Wolverhampton, as an industrialising Midlands town, collected Cox's paintings with particular enthusiasm precisely because they offered a vision of England that contrasted with the factory landscape outside the gallery's doors. Cox had close associations with the Midlands, having taught drawing in Birmingham for many years before settling at Harborne. Counting the Flock depicts the daily ritual of a shepherd tallying his animals — a scene of patient vigilance that Victorian viewers associated with scriptural imagery of the Good Shepherd as well as with the honest toil celebrated by social reformers like John Ruskin.

The canvas is worked with broad, sweeping marks that capture the texture of rough grazing land. Cox uses a restricted palette of ochre, grey-green and warm brown, with sky light indicated by thin, luminous passages in the upper register. The flock is rendered as a collective mass rather than individual animals, their woolly forms suggested through clustered dabs of cream and grey.