for the marvelous skill in which the creature’s coat is reproduced and the character of his eye.
For pictures of cattle in the surroundings of the farm we have had two notable schools of art, the Dutch and the French. In the seventeenth-century Dutch group belong Cuyp, Adrian van der Velde, Berchem, Paul Potter, Du Jardin, and Wouverman. Examples of these masters are in all the galleries of the Netherlands, and the more important pictures have been reproduced by the large foreign photographers. The traditions of Dutch cattle painting have held their own in a remarkable way through the successive generations. The favorite animal is the cow, which a witty modern critic has described as the “omnipresent quadruped” of Dutch art, the “inexhaustible source of ideas re-created a hundred times, but always lending itself to fresh transformations.” A group of nineteenth-century men have proved themselves worthy followers of the great seventeenth-century school. Conspicuous among them are Mauve and Maris. The Metropolitan has excellent examples of Mauve as well as of the Belgian Verboeckhoven.
Pictures from modern French animal works are widely circulated. Nearly all of us are familiar with Rosa Bonheur’s Ploughing in Nivernais, where the huge oxen, three yokes for each of the two ploughs, plod patiently across the field drawing the primitive implement which upturns the soil for the planting. Pretty well known, too, are Troyon’s Oxen going to Work and the Return to the Farm, companion subjects in the Louvre. Émile Marcke was a pupil of
