Michael and the Unfinished Sheepfold

Michael and the Unfinished Sheepfold, painted in 1920 and in The Wilson gallery in Cheltenham, takes its subject from William Wordsworth's 1800 poem Michael, a pastoral elegy about an elderly shepherd whose son leaves for the city, abandoning both father and the half-built sheepfold they had begun together. The ruined sheepfold becomes in Wordsworth's poem a monument to absence and broken promise, a symbol of the collapse of the rural pastoral ideal before economic modernity. Rivière's choice of this subject for a post-war painting resonates with the losses of 1914–1918, mapping the poem's grief onto a landscape now saturated with the memory of men who had not returned to their fields and farms.

The subject demanded a landscape of particular gravity: the unfinished sheepfold as a formal presence within a Wordsworthian Cumberland scene. Rivière's handling of sheep is characteristically precise, and the old shepherd's figure would have been posed to suggest age and persistence. The palette favours the cool greens and grey-blues of northern English fell landscape.