This Tragic Painting Is Painfully Beautiful

This piece is called Anguish by August Friedrich Schenck. A mother sheep cries out in despair over the death of her lamb, as a group of crows wait patiently to feast on it.

This painting is gut wrenching. But I think the most interesting and potentially disturbing part about it is the crows. They could pester and peck but they don’t, they simply wait. Because that’s all they really need to do. Worst case scenario for them, the mother sheep eventually moves on, best case scenario, she becomes weak and falls from exhaustion and the birds get to feast on both of them. Looking at it this way, the crows seem to embody the cruelty and selfishness that exists in our world.

When Anguish was first exhibited in the Paris salon of 1878, it really resonated with people. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, in the 19th century, death was at the forefront of everyone's minds. Diseases like tuberculosis were rampant and took many people when they were young. And also because Queen Victoria was mourning her late husband, Prince Albert, at the time which made death weirdly fashionable.

But also because a few years before this painting was created, Charles Darwin released his book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. This book introduced the idea that animals share some of the same emotions like joy, sadness and pain that humans do. These were groundbreaking ideas and shifted people’s mindsets from thinking about animals as purely existing for our consumption and pleasure to thinking of them as more like us. Dr. Ted Gott, the National Gallery of Victoria Senior Curator in International Art suggested that this painting may have been inspired by Darwin’s groundbreaking ideas.

Although this piece sits among paintings from much more popular artists such as Rembrandt and Monet, it’s consistently ranked as a crowd favorite. This piece is currently hanging in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. The gallery has around 75,000 works in its permanent collection, but Anguish has been voted twice as one of the museum's most popular works. I think the success of this painting speaks to the fact that no matter the time, the feeling of pain and loss resonates with almost everyone. Thank you for watching!

Credits:

African Drums (Sting) by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...
Artist: http://www.twinmusicom.org/