Sheep & Wool

Antique Prints of Sheep, Wool and Pastoral Agriculture

This category brings together original antique prints, engravings and illustrations depicting sheep, wool production and pastoral agriculture, produced across the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain, Europe and Australia. These works document an industry that was central to the economic life of Britain, Australia and the wider agricultural world across the period they record, generating a body of illustrated material that reflects both the economic importance of wool and sheep production and the aesthetic appeal of pastoral subjects in the artistic tradition of the period.

British sheep prints encompass the tradition of agricultural illustration that developed from the late 18th century onwards as the agricultural revolution transformed the productivity and character of British farming. The improvement of sheep breeds through systematic selection — a process associated with breeders including Robert Bakewell and the founders of the great sheep breed societies — generated prints celebrating champion rams, improved breed types and the results of scientific breeding programmes that would have been incomprehensible to earlier generations. Agricultural society publications, breed society records and the illustrated agricultural press all contributed to a body of sheep illustration that combines scientific documentation with the visual conventions of the animal portrait tradition.

Australian wool and sheep prints carry a particular significance in this collection, reflecting the central importance of the wool industry to Australian economic history from the early colonial period onwards. The pastoral expansion that opened the Australian interior to sheep grazing, the development of the great wool stations of the Riverina and the western districts, and the regular illustrated coverage of shearing, wool classing and the wool auction that appeared in the colonial illustrated press all generated prints of considerable documentary importance for the history of Australian agriculture and rural life.

Pastoral landscape prints depicting sheep in their environment — the rolling downs of English wool country, the vast plains of the Australian outback, the mountain pastures of Europe — connect the documentary tradition of agricultural illustration to the broader tradition of landscape art, in which flocks of sheep appear as elements of picturesque scenery as much as evidence of agricultural productivity.

Antique sheep and wool prints are collected for their agricultural historical interest, their documentary value as records of a transformative industry, and the decorative appeal of pastoral subjects in the English and Australian landscape tradition.