Victorian Winter Church New Year Greeting Card with Snow

The decision to render the sky in a warm peach glow does absolutely nothing to salvage the bleak 'everyone has died and only the shepherd remains' energy of this composition. A lone figure trudges through a snow-choked landscape while his small flock of sheep shuffle toward an ominous stone tower looming behind bare, skeletal trees—truly a vision of hope and renewal that fails completely at conveying it. John Winsch, whose copyright proudly stamps the bottom right corner of this 1914 exercise in pastoral despair, somehow convinced an entire nation that multicolored ornate lettering would distract from the fact that the central character looks like he's herding his sheep directly into the void.