The Good Shepherd painting: John 10 and how artists have shown it

The picture was probably over a bed. Your grandmother's, or the one in the Sunday-school room where you sat on a small chair: Jesus in a pale robe, a lamb against his chest, the flock at his feet. You may never have wondered who painted it, or why it looks the way it does.

It turns out that the Good Shepherd painting is the oldest way Christians have ever pictured Jesus. Older than the crucifix. Older than the bearded man in a robe most of us see when we close our eyes.

It has been painted for about eighteen hundred years without a break. Here is where it came from, how it changed, and what to look for before you hang one over a bed of your own.

Where does the Good Shepherd painting come from in the Bible?

John 10, where Jesus says the words himself, and a few older passages that had already pictured God as a shepherd. No Gospel ever shows Jesus picking up a lamb. The painting gives a teaching a body.

Here is what he said:

"I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." (John 10:11, KJV)

"I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine." (John 10:14, KJV)

Two other verses gave painters the gestures they have used ever since. In the parable of the lost sheep, the shepherd finds the one that wandered and "layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing" (Luke 15:5, KJV). That is the lamb across the shoulders.

In Isaiah, God "shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom" (Isaiah 40:11, KJV). That is the lamb held against the chest. And behind both stands the psalm you could probably say in your sleep: "The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want." (Psalm 23:1, KJV)

What the lamb means, and why it is not the Lamb of God, is a different question, and we answer it in our guide to the meaning of Jesus holding a lamb. This one is about the painters, and what they did with it.

What did the first Good Shepherd pictures look like?

A beardless young man in a short tunic, a sheep across his shoulders, another sheep or two at his feet. That is who is on the walls of the Roman catacombs in the third century, and he is the earliest picture of Christ that survives in any number.

You can still see him in the Catacomb of Priscilla and the Catacomb of Callixtus, painted in quick strokes on plaster ceilings and burial niches. He does not look like the Jesus you grew up with. He looks like a Roman shepherd boy, and that was the point.

Greek and Roman art already had a stock figure of a youth carrying a ram or a sheep on his shoulders, and Christian painters borrowed the pose wholesale. To a pagan neighbor it read as a country scene. To the family burying their dead beneath it, it read as John 10 and Luke 15.

Many historians think that double meaning is one reason the image served so well while the faith was still persecuted. That is an inference from the pictures, though, not something the painters wrote down.

The same figure turns up far from Rome. At Dura-Europos, a garrison town on the Euphrates in what is now Syria, archaeologists uncovered a house converted for Christian worship in the mid-third century, with a small baptistery.

Above the font was painted the Good Shepherd and his flock. Whoever was baptized there came up out of the water and looked at a shepherd.

There is even a statue. A marble Good Shepherd of the same type stands in the Vatican Museums, rebuilt in the eighteenth century from an early Christian fragment, most likely from a sarcophagus. The figure turns up on so many early Christian tombs that you can see how much this one image mattered.

What happened to the shepherd after Constantine?

He got grander, and then he got scarce. Once Christianity became the religion of emperors, the shepherd boy was dressed in gold, and within a few centuries he had mostly given way to Christ as ruler and judge.

You can watch it happen in one building. In Ravenna, the small fifth-century Mausoleum of Galla Placidia holds a mosaic of Christ as shepherd, seated on a rock among his sheep. He wears a golden tunic and a purple mantle, the colors of imperial rank, and instead of a crook he holds a tall cross.

The sheep are still drawn tenderly. The shepherd is now unmistakably a king.

From there the image thins out. Byzantine and medieval churches wanted Christ enthroned, Christ blessing, Christ in judgment over the west door. The shepherd lived on in manuscripts, small carvings and stained glass, but for many centuries he was seldom the subject of a major altarpiece.

When a great painter did come back to him, the form was often softened. In the seventeenth century Bartolomé Esteban Murillo painted the Good Shepherd as a small child seated with a lamb, a canvas now in the Prado in Madrid.

Why are so many pictures of Jesus with sheep from the 1800s?

Because printing made pictures cheap, and that century wanted the Gospels told tenderly. Most of the Jesus and sheep paintings you would recognize were made between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, and they reached homes as engravings, Bible plates and Sunday-school cards.

The version most of us carry in our heads is by the German painter Bernhard Plockhorst. His Good Shepherd stands full-length in a landscape, a staff in one hand, a lamb in the crook of the other arm, the flock at his feet and one ewe looking up at him.

It was reproduced enormously, and much of what came after borrowed from it. Stained glass took the subject up too. In the United States, Tiffany Studios and its competitors made the Good Shepherd a staple of memorial windows. A great many American churches still have one, a robed figure holding a lamb against a landscape of layered opalescent glass.

Not every painter went soft. Henry Ossawa Tanner, the American painter and son of an African Methodist Episcopal bishop, kept returning to the Good Shepherd in the early twentieth century. His shepherds are small figures under night skies in the deep blues he was known for, closer to Psalm 23's dark valley than to a sunny hillside.

Then came Warner Sallman. After his Head of Christ in 1940 became one of the most reproduced pictures ever made, earning its place among the most famous paintings of Jesus, he painted Jesus with a lamb in his arms as The Lord Is My Shepherd. That image traveled the same roads, into wallets, calendars and church basements.

Which Jesus with lamb painting is the famous one?

There is no official answer, but Plockhorst's Good Shepherd is probably the most reproduced of the nineteenth century and Sallman's The Lord Is My Shepherd the most reproduced of the twentieth. Between them they decided what most of us expect a picture of Jesus and a lamb to look like.

That expectation is quite specific: a standing figure in a pale robe and colored mantle, one lamb held, the flock at his feet, warm light, nothing dangerous anywhere. It is a gentle image, and it has comforted a great many people through a great many nights. It is also one moment in a long story.

The earliest Christians would not have recognized it. Their shepherd was young and quick and carried the sheep on his back.

What should I look for before I hang one?

Look at how the lamb is held, whether the flock is there, and whether anything in the frame is dangerous. Those three choices tell you which passage the painter had in mind, and they change how the picture feels in a room at night.

The lamb across the shoulders is Luke 15: the lost one found and carried home, and the painting is about coming back. The lamb held against the chest is Isaiah 40: gathered and carried, and the painting is about being kept safe.

A whole flock around the shepherd's feet leans toward Psalm 23, provision and peace, and paintings made from Psalm 23 tend to be brighter and more open. A single lamb with no flock in sight leans toward John 10 and the one sheep that matters.

Then there is the wolf. Jesus put it in the passage himself: the hireling "seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth" (John 10:12, KJV). Most paintings leave the wolf out, and what is left is a pretty landscape.

A few keep it at the edge, held off by the shepherd. Those are harder to look at and, to our eye, more honest. The lamb is safe because someone stands between it and something real.

Finally, look at the face and the colors. A shepherd who looks out at you is asking to be met. One who looks down at the lamb is asking you to be the lamb. Bright, warm colors comfort at a glance; muted earths and dusk light make a picture you can still stand to look at in ten years.

If you are choosing one for a pastor's study, the single lamb held close speaks to the calling itself, since pastor is Latin for shepherd. Our guide to gifts for pastors at Christmas has other ideas for the study.

What did we do differently in Safe in His Care?

Safe in His Care is our canvas of John 10:11-15, and we made the third choice above on purpose: the wolves are in the frame. The shepherd holds a lamb close against his chest, and beyond his reach, where they have stopped, the wolves wait.

We made it as a symbol rather than an event, because John 10 is a teaching and not a story. The lamb is held rather than led, which is our reading of Isaiah 40:11. There is no flock, so the picture stays about the one.

And the wolves are there because the passage is honest about them. A Good Shepherd with nothing to guard against is only half of what Jesus said.

The colors are chalk, soft earth and muted olive, a hillside at dusk, so it sits quietly on a wall instead of shouting from it. Like everything we make it is made to order in the US on matte cotton-polyester canvas over a solid pine stretcher, frameless or in a natural or black pine frame, in sizes from 8x12 to 30x40 inches, from $59 frameless and $129 framed.

It sits with our other images of Christ in the Jesus wall art collection, if you want to see it next to the sea scenes and the portrait before you decide.

The same gesture for eighteen centuries

The styles could not be more different. The shepherd has been a Roman boy, a Byzantine king, a child with a lamb, a Victorian in a landscape, a small shape under Tanner's night sky. The gesture has never changed: a sheep that cannot save itself, lifted and carried by someone who chose to.

That is why the picture keeps getting painted, and why people keep hanging it in the rooms where they sleep. Whatever the century puts on the shepherd's back, the lamb in his arms is you.

Frequently asked

Who painted the most famous Good Shepherd painting?

Nobody owns the subject, but two names come up more than any other: Bernhard Plockhorst, for his nineteenth-century Good Shepherd, and Warner Sallman, for The Lord Is My Shepherd. The oldest versions, in the catacombs and at Ravenna, were painted by people whose names we will never know.

Where is the oldest Good Shepherd painting?

In the Roman catacombs, especially those of Priscilla and Callixtus, painted in the third century. A Good Shepherd of about the same age was found above the baptistery font of the house church at Dura-Europos in Syria.

Why is the lamb on Jesus' shoulders in some paintings and in his arms in others?

Two different verses. The shoulders come from Luke 15:5, where the shepherd finds the lost sheep and "layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing." The arms come from Isaiah 40:11, where God gathers the lambs with his arm and carries them in his bosom. The early Christians preferred the shoulders; later painters preferred the arms.

Is a Jesus and lamb painting a good choice for a nursery?

Yes, and parents have thought so for a long time. The picture is gentle, you can tell the story to a three-year-old in one sentence, and it says what you want said over a sleeping baby. Pick a smaller size and a muted palette that will not fight the room.

Passages cited: John 10:11-15 (10:11, 10:12 and 10:14 quoted); Luke 15:5; Isaiah 40:11; Psalm 23:1.