Painted at the time of Francisco Oller’s first stay in Paris, Shepherd Tending His Flock exemplifies Jean-François Millet’s dignified representations of French rural subjects. Despite their idyllic appearance today, such subjects, displayed publicly at the annual Salons of the time, carried a critique of the urban middle class’s exploitation of people and resources through industrialization.
   Although no friendship between Oller and Millet is documented, Oller certainly shared the Realist painter’s sympathies for depictions of peasants engaged in backbreaking manual labor. He would later portray Caribbean country people in the equally charged sociopolitical background of Spanish colonial Puerto Rico.

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   The son of farmers, Millet understood both the reassuring cycle of the seasons and the frightening prospect of ruin at nature’s whim. From the late 1840s, he dedicated his career to a simultaneously heroic and bleak depiction of the peasants of Barbizon, the farming community outside Paris where he lived. Millet’s uncompromising representation of the French peasantry earned him the scorn of conservative critics. In this painting, Millet endows the shepherd with an imposing monumentality, bringing him to the foreground of the image, where he looms above the horizon line. Yet the figure hunches over his staff, his nearly featureless face gape-mouthed, perhaps with exhaustion or pain. And while Millet’s shepherd tends a large flock, the parched yellow and brown grass in the foreground has been interpreted as a suggestion of future scarcity. Other scholars have offered religious readings of the image, likening the shepherd to Christ.

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