Koch painted this picture in Rome on the basis of drawings he had made during a period spent in Switzerland 1792-94. The Norwegian landscape artist I.C. Dahl, whom Thorvaldsen held in high regard, was in Rome just at the time when this picture was being painted, and it is believed that the shepherd and his lass and the goats were painted by Dahl himself, something that also seems probable if we compare these figures with the corresponding figures of animals in Dahl’s Norwegian Mountain Valley. The painting is in general atypical of Koch, and it has been suggested that the entire picture was in fact painted by Dahl and based on Koch’s composition.
