Florence Baptistery
In a seeming anachronism, the painting shows sheep being shorn with blade shears rather than the machine shears which started to enter Australian shearing sheds in the late 1880s. Art historian Terry Smith's suggestion that Roberts presented a deliberately historical vision of shearing has been questioned on account of there being no evidence that electric shears had been introduced to Brocklesby at the time of the painting's composition. The young man carrying the fleece on the left of the painting alludes to the figure of Esau in Ghiberti's "Gates of Paradise" at the Florence Baptistery. The model for the smiling tar-boy at the centre of the picture, the only figure to make eye contact with the viewer, was actually a girl, 9-year-old Susan Bourne, who lived until 1979. She also assisted Roberts by kicking up dust in the shed to allow him to capture some of the atmosphere.