Girl with a Lamb, near Schaffhausen

William James Müller's Girl with a Lamb, near Schaffhausen, painted in 1835 when the artist was on a tour of Switzerland, combines landscape observation with pastoral figure composition in the manner of earlier British artists who looked to the Alps for picturesque and sublime material. Schaffhausen, on the Swiss-German border near the Rhine Falls, was a standard stopping point on the Grand Tour and the artistic itinerary, and Müller was one of many British painters who visited in the early nineteenth century. The young girl with a lamb is a conventional figure of innocent pastoral beauty — the lamb of course carrying additional religious symbolic weight — placed against the specific topography of the Swiss countryside rather than an invented Arcadia. Müller was a prodigiously energetic traveler and this work is part of an extensive campaign of studies made on this journey.

Müller places the figure in a landscape that is recognizably Swiss in its scale and atmosphere, the distant mountain form providing geographic specificity. The girl and lamb are painted with warmth and naturalistic observation, their scale modest within the landscape. The palette is fresh and observational, the handling fluid and confident.