In owning a flock of artificial sheep, Joseph Farquharson must have been unusual among Highland lairds a century ago. His Aberdeenshire estate covered 20,000 acres — surely enough to support the modest local ovine needs. But Farquharson was a painter, the fake sheep artist’s models. For cleanliness and biddability, few grazing ewes can match a woolly dummy.
Joseph Farquharson was 27 when he scored his first hit at the Royal Academy in 1873. ‘Day’s Dying Glow’ depicts a handful of sheep negotiating a snowy incline alongside an icy burn. Leafless trees crown a mound. Behind them a sickly sun is sinking or possibly rising. It is an image of some technical proficiency, which a Victorian audience, versed in reading paintings as visual narratives, could just about imbue with meaning and sentiment.
Farquharson evidently enjoyed the experience. For the next half-century, he reworked that first glistening vignette, alternating dusk with dawn, adding or subtracting trees, incorporating a shepherd, piling his snow thicker and thicker, and pillaging Burns or Milton for suitably evocative titles.
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