Over the past year, a comparatively obscure 19th-century painting by a little-known French-German artist has captured the imagination of audiences across social media, drawing viewers in through the rendering of a uniquely dramatic and devastating scene.

Aptly titled Anguish (ca. 1876), the painting depicts a snowy landscape with an ewe standing over the limp body of her lamb while bleating up at an overcast sky, her breath hanging in the cold air as a faint smear of red blood dribbles from the lamb’s mouth. Encircling the mother and child is a murder of crows, presumably waiting ominously for a moment to descend on the lamb’s corpse.

Ferdinand Mulnier, Schenck (1876). Collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The artist behind this poignant vignette is August Friedrich Schenck (1828–1901), who was best known in his time for his landscapes and animal paintings, namely of sheep. Originally from the town of Glückstadt, then under the control of Denmark and currently part of Germany, Schenck spent the first years of his early career working with and studying wine, which allowed him to travel extensively throughout Europe. Eventually, he settled in Paris and dedicated himself to painting.

A student of École des Beaux-Arts professor Léon Cogniet, a leading proponent of the academic style, Schenck first publicly exhibited his work at the 1855 World Exhibition. He soon garnered a reputation for his compositions of animals, a genre of painting that was quite popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Edwin Landseer, The Monarch of the Glen (1851). Collection of the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.

Unlike many of his contemporaries who also specialized in animal paintings, such as Edwin Landseer (1802–1873) or Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899), whose work predominantly focused on the animals themselves, Schenck’s paintings frequently employ animals as compositional devices in the rendering of greater, often life-or-death narratives full of drama and movement. A large swath of the artist’s oeuvre features herds of sheep navigating hostile terrain and weather, their wool matted with snow and jostling in fear. Occasionally the figure of a shepherd or a sheepdog, too battling the elements, is shown amongst the sheep.

August Friedrich Schenck, A Flock of Sheep in a Snow Storm (n.d.). Private collection.

Out of all Schenck’s paintings, Anguish has remained his most famous. It was acquired in 1880 by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, one of the museum’s earliest acquisitions, and out of the museum’s more than 76,000 work-strong collection, the painting was voted top five most popular in 1906 and again in 2011. On TikTok, user videos of the work have collectively garnered millions of likes.

Part of the allure of Anguish can be attributed to the painting’s ability to convey a range of deeply human emotions despite containing only animals. Despair, grief, fear, and, of course, anguish, the concise yet heartbreaking narrative continues to resonate with audiences more than a century after its making.

August Friedrich Schenck, L’Orphelin, souvenir d’Auvergne (1885). Collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Several more obscure works by Schenck highlight the artist’s skillful expression of emotion through animalia. Created nearly a decade after Anguish, the artists produced an inverse counterpart, L’Orphelin, souvenir d’Auvergne (1885). Offering an emotional gut-punch more akin to the opening scene of Disney’s Bambi (1942), here, a cowering lamb stares out fearfully beside the body of its dead mother. Its small muzzle agape in perhaps a small bleat heard only by the watchful crows lined up on the rough-hewn fence behind it. A streak of red on the snow from the mother ewe’s mouth is the only shock of color in the otherwise dark and muted composition.

Harkening back to Schenck’s earlier career, more emotional horrors can be found in Donkey Surprised by a Wolf (ca. 1860–1870), wherein a donkey has become ensnared by their harness in the underbrush, and in the background the shadowy form of a wolf looms. The dread and panic are palpable as the donkey is shown in a clearly futile attempt to pull itself free.

August Friedrich Schenck, Donkey Surprised by Wolf (ca. 1860–1870).

While little is known about Schenck himself, historical context can help illuminate what some of his inspirations might have been. Working within 19th-century France, during a time later termed the Belle Époque, the optimism of the Industrial Revolution and cultural and scientific enlightenment was balanced by a cultural fascination with death. Mourning jewelry was all the rage, and Parisian morgues were popular attractions. As for the interest in animals themselves, National Gallery of Victoria curator Tedd Got proposed that Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and later The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1972) presented a new perspective on the potential parallel emotional experiences of humans and animals.

While these contemporaneous trends help explain the early fame of Schenck’s work, its continued popularity speaks to the enduring significance that emotional resonance has in a painting—or any artwork for that matter—and the tragic timbre of Anguish has clearly hit a nerve with contemporary audiences.