The Adoration of the Shepherds
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
The file this print is made from
Sizes
About this painting
Poussin cut what would have explained the picture. A British Museum study tethers a lamb before Christ and lays a frieze fragment in the left foreground; both are gone. He left the wreckage standing: a stable built inside classical ruins, which the Gallery reads as Christianity's triumph over paganism.
What survives of antiquity is not the fragment but the architecture, and the shepherds: rigid folds and muscular limbs taken from ancient statues. They kneel in the ruins of the world that carved them. The British Museum calls those removals minor. One of them was the lamb.
Sources: The National Gallery, London, NG6277, object page, oil on canvas, 97.2 x 74 cm, about 1633-4 (accessed 2026-08-16) · The British Museum, drawing, museum number Ff,2.163 · Victoria and Albert Museum, 'The Adoration of the Shepherds', after Poussin, Mitchell Bequest 1878
And they came with haste: and they found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger.
Luke 2:16 · Douay-Rheims (Challoner), from the project’s own corpus at data/bible_drc.js
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 4,198 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.