This sculpture depicts a boy sitting on a large cushion; his head rests on his right hand. It is made from rock crystal which has been carved and decorated with delicate gold mounts as well as rubies, emeralds and sapphires. If you look carefully you can see tiny lambs on his right shoulder and in his left hand. This tells us that the figure is in fact Jesus Christ in his role as the Good Shepherd, watching over his flocks of Christian believers. The story of Christ as the Good Shepherd appears in the Bible, in the New Testament parables.

This figure was made in around 1600 in the Portuguese colony of Goa, India, where there was a major centre of Christianity. Today the Christian influences on the region and its people can still be seen. But, at the time many of the craftsmen were non-Christian, and this figure of Christ is very similar to figures of the Buddha or the Hindu god Krishna.

It is difficult for us today, when we live surrounded by glass, to realise how special rock crystal is. A form of quartz, it is in fact one of the hardest minerals known. To work a piece of raw quartz into the delicately carved figure of the Good Shepherd would have taken many hundreds of hours. This beautiful small sculpture would therefore have been prized from the day it was made. Its first, almost certainly noble Portuguese, owner would have bought it both for its Christian subject-matter as well as in admiration of the skill required to create this masterpiece.