Boy and Girl in a Field with Sheep

Boy and Girl in a Field with Sheep belongs to Homer's rural New England subjects of the late 1860s and early 1870s, when he was developing the pastoral genre scenes that followed his wartime illustration work. The subject — children watching sheep in an open field — draws on the English pastoral tradition that Homer knew through prints and magazines while giving it a specifically American inflection: the children are not idealized figures but real, specific American farm kids. These rural subjects showed Homer absorbing and transforming the influence of the Barbizon painters — particularly Millet's children in fields — into something distinctly American in its openness and light.

The open field composition gives Homer the high-key daylight palette he favored in this period: warm golden light on the field, bright sky above, the children's figures silhouetted or brightly lit depending on their relationship to the sun. His handling of the sheep as textural woolly forms against the grass demonstrates his observational accuracy.