Potter here combines animal painting with a genre scene. A couple avoids the glare of the sun by sitting in the patch of shade afforded by a sheep shelter. The lumpen coarseness of their figures is emphasised, probably unintentionally, by their disproportionate scale. The man, for example, is very much larger than the seated cow on the right which, even allowing for recession, produces an uncomfortable effect, and is due to Potter’s practice of combining individual sketches to build up a picture without paying sufficient attention to their relative positions. Potter’s fascination with the different qualities of light is, nevertheless, beautifully expressed in the crisp dark shadows and the highlights which catch the windows of the hut, the sheep’s head and the hair, hand and kneecap of the shepherd, lending the forms fuller definition.