At the age of twenty, Walter Hunt had exhibited his first picture at The Royal Academy. Thirty-six years later, in 1897, when Hunt submitted Motherless-The Shepherds Pet, he had already established himself as one of the pre-eminant painters of the Victorian era. Like his father before him, Charles Hunt, and his brothers Edgar and Charles, Jr. he focused his paintings on animal subjects. The rise of the gentleman farmer at the end of the 19th Century led to an increase in commissioned animal portraits and pastoral scenes. In Hunt's pictures we can see these animals not oly depicted realistically in a variety of situations but also rendered with a sensative study of the animal's expressions and mannerisms. This notion of painting animals as they actually were, rather than in their subservient attitude towards man, was a popular new tent of the animal painters of the late 19th Century. Not only was Hunt acknowledged for his pastoral scenes but he was also lauded for his dog pictures, particularly his collies. Motherless--The Shepherds Pet, was well received when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy both for its sentimental subject of a collie tenderly attanding to a stray lamb, and also for the depiction of the collie alone.

This painting was used as a greeting card by The Medici Society, Ltd. in 1992.