Sheepshearing

Johann Adam Klein was a painter and engraver from Nuremberg, Germany. He spent most of the period 1811–18 at the Art Academy in Vienna, where he designed and printed the etchings Dromedary and Camel (2013.382) and Sheepshearing (2013.384). Indeed, Klein specified below the image that he drew the camels from life in the famed Vienna zoo, the Menagerie Schönbrunn. No such declaration of accuracy or outdoor observation accompanies the more quotidian, but energetic, scene of sheep having their wool sheared.