Entry

In Northern Netherlandish cabinet sculpture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one observes a clear predilection for themes of a lofty nature, but also for ‘lowly’ subjects depicting the simplicity of rural life, scenes involving comical or farcical acts and the portrayal of individuals with disreputable professions. Most often these works centre on a humoristic play rooted in the reversal of social morals and values. Among members of the social upper class, such sculptures were seen as models of negative behaviour serving to confirm their own superiority.¹ The tronies, actors, beer-drinkers, peasant men and women, beggars, peddlers, street musicians, and even farm animals,² were subjects inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish genre painting. In addition to carvings in boxwood and modelled terracottas, small figures cast in bronze also exist from this period. Due to the rather primitive technical execution in yellowish bronze or brass and their likeness to Northern Netherlandish pictorial traditions, these bronze statuettes are today typically interpreted as works of Dutch or Flemish manufacture.³ In most cases, they are relatively heavy bronzes with integrally cast rectangular or square socles.

These two virtually identical bovines stand on separately cast base plates – they come from the same model, with only the positioning of the horns on 'Bovine B' (see BK-1978-18-B) somewhat modified on the wax model – belong to the same category of rustic cabinet sculpture centring on the glorification of rural life. They can be seen as part of a much broader interest in the simplicity of living off the land enjoyed by the Dutch and Flemish elite. This interest is also reflected in the possession of country houses, where one could withdraw from the turmoil of city life, the rise of the hofdicht (‘country house poetry’) genre, poems praising the virtues of Arcadian life in the same vein as classical Roman writers, ⁴ and in painted works of art depicting outdoor living, hunting and farming. By the end of the seventeenth century, the milking of cows and the making of dairy products had even become a princely endeavour: Queen Mary Stuart, wife of King-Stadholder William III, had established her own dairy at Hampton Court, in imitation of the French court at Versailles.

Since the Renaissance, a respectable tradition of autonomous bronze images of horses has existed in sculpture, often inspired by examples from Antiquity such as the horses of San Marco in Venice. This is reflected in Antwerp and Dutch inventories of the seventeenth century, where citations of independent bronze horses occur quite commonly, e.g. Een peerdeken gegoten van bronze (A small horse cast in bronze), Een copere Peerdeken op ebben voet (A small copper Horse on an ebony foot),⁵ or simply 1 metael paertje (1 small metal horse).⁶ Encountered far less frequently are sculptural depictions of cows, though they do incidentally appear in painters’ inventories. One case in point is a plaster statuette of a recumbent cow standing on a shelf laden with other workshop requisites in Jan Steen’s painting entitled The Drawing Lesson (c. 1665).⁷ A very similar sculpture of a bovine modelled in polychromed terracotta is preserved in the Louvre. According to the inscription on the (later) socle, it was purportedly made by the painter Adriaen van de Velde in 1659,⁸ an attribution ostensibly based primarily on the figure’s similarity to Van de Velde’s engravings of cows. Another example is the large bellowing bull attributed to the Antwerp sculptor Artus Quellinus I (BK-16944), of which numerous versions are known.⁹ By contrast, Dutch and Flemish painting and engravings include many more examples of bovine animals depicted as independent figures, including an engraving of a peasant woman and a cow by Lucas van Leyden from 1510.¹⁰ More than a century later, Paulus Potter even went so far as to make cattle a central theme in his work. Potter’s bullenboekje (Book of Bulls), published in 1650 by Clement de Jonge, contains a collection of engraved depictions of bulls and cows, which in their conception approach the autonomous depiction of the two bronze cows discussed here.¹¹ Cows and peasant women also figure central in the work of the Antwerp painter Jan Siberechts (1627-1703). Lastly, cows were employed as symbols of the (prosperity of the) Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, such as when incorporated, for example, in the scene of Argus and Mercury that formed one of six tableaux vivants or pageants shown on the Dam Square in Amsterdam in 1648 celebrating the Peace of Münster. Shortly thereafter, Artus Quellinus devised a marble version of the same scene in the Amsterdam city hall, with Argus this time personifying the city burgomasters, who keep strict guard to ensure no one steals the cow symbolizing the city of Amsterdam.¹²

This pair of bronze bovines may also be interpreted as works exemplifying this local visual tradition. Rather than glorifying a Dutch national symbol, they perhaps functioned as a playful commentary on the serious depiction of steers and horses in bronze sculpture. A dating earlier than the mid-eighteenth century must be deemed improbable when considering the bronze alloy, which also comprises English copper.

Frits Scholten, 2025