Object of the Day: Baa, Baa Frightened Sheep

Click image to enlarge.

Well, what have we here? It’s not a trade card. It’s printed on very thin, almost oniony paper. It appears to me that this was cut from a book. There’s nothing printed on the reverse, but there’s a lot going on in the scene on the front.

The chromolithograph brings us the sort of genre scene which was all the rage from the late Eighteenth to early Twentieth Centuries. I figure this scrap dates to about 1860-1870. It shows a pair of tots engaged in bucolic farm antics. The young boy in blue breeches is making a basket. Perhaps it’s a scene from a mental institution. Meanwhile, the boy in red breeches is shearing a sheep. Or—maybe he’s holding a knife to its throat and threatening it for some reason. It looks terrified and he looks…determined, at best. 

And, just for fun, here's a clip from my favorite miniseries of the early part of the Twentieth Century, "The Tenth Kingdom."