The Flooded Marais: The Shepherd 1911

Auguste-Louis Lepère made this etching, The Flooded Marais: The Shepherd, and what strikes me are the delicate lines that swarm the surface. I can imagine Lepère hunched over a copper plate, his hand moving across it with painstaking precision. The scene depicts a flooded landscape with a shepherd navigating a boat filled with sheep. Lepère’s mark-making captures the reflections on the water, the texture of the sheep’s wool, and the bare branches of the trees. You know, it’s not just a picture, it is a whole world in there! It reminds me of the Barbizon school painters. There's a quiet melancholy to the work, a sense of the everyday struggles of rural life. I can imagine Lepère trying to convey this feeling, grappling with the difficulties of portraying water, light, and movement. Painting, like life, is a process of constant negotiation, of embracing the unexpected and allowing the work to evolve organically. Like Lepère here, we are all shepherds, navigating the flooded marshes of our own making.