The Parable of the Lost Sheep

The Parable of the Lost Sheep is an unusual subject for Grimshaw, whose output was largely secular — nocturnal townscapes, coastal scenes, and literary subjects rather than biblical narrative. This work, now in the Princeton University Art Museum, places him within a broad Victorian tradition of New Testament illustration, where the parables provided accessible, morally legible subjects that avoided the doctrinal complexity of theological painting. The parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:3–7), in which a shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep to find one that has strayed, was among the most frequently depicted biblical subjects in the nineteenth century, offering both pastoral landscape and moral lesson in a single image. Grimshaw's handling would likely emphasise the landscape setting as much as the narrative — the terrain where the sheep was lost as the visual subject, the shepherd as the human element within it.

Oil on canvas with a composition combining figurative narrative and landscape setting. Grimshaw would approach the pastoral scene with his characteristic attention to atmospheric conditions — cloud, light quality, and terrain — while the shepherd and sheep provide the narrative anchor. The Princeton holding represents a relatively rare biblical subject within his known oeuvre.