The pastoral iconography of our oil painting was dear to Flandrin, who was attached to the figure of the shepherd, which reminded him of his youth in the Bugey region: ‘it’s lovely to hear the song of shepherds returning in the evening with their flocks; it takes me back to my youth when I was a shepherd myself’. Several paintings with a similar subject are known, depicting a man dressed in antique style in a natural setting with a Virgilian atmosphere, including Les Bords du Rhône près de Vienne (Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Inv. A 2897), and La Solitude (Paris, Musée du Louvre Inv. RF 1977 434).