Blister Heads Cows in the Polder near Zevenhoven, Han Singels, 2004
Around 2009, the Rijksmuseum’s Dutch History Department asked photographers to help devise new approaches in documentary photography. Singels – a classic photojournalist in black-andwhite – immediately donated his latest work: a lifesize colour photograph of the cows Vivian and Vera, a modern variation on Paulus Potter’s The Bull. Shortly thereafter, Vivian and Vera’s owner, the old farmer Kees Verhaar, passed on his forty cows to his successor.