Landscape with Bull and Cows

David Cox (1783-1859)
Landscape with Bull and Cows

Watercolour heightened with bodycolour, scratching out and stopping out
15.8 by 21.5 cm., 6 ¼ by 8 ½ in.

Provenance:
Holbrook Gaskell (1812-1909);
With Thos. Agnew & Sons

Exhibited:
City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Works by David Cox, 1890, no. 312

Literature:
Whitworth Wallis and Arthur Bensley Chamberlain, Catalogue of a Special Collection of Works by David Cox, 1890, no. 312, p. 51

This watercolour, which dates from the early 1830s, is described in the 1890 exhibition catalogue as follows: `Patches of Heather upon sand, bull standing in centre, with two cows, one lying down; windmill in distance on right; other cattle on left; blue sky with clouds on horizon.'

Holbrook Gaskell who owned this watercolour was a Liverpool industrialist and a major collector of British Pictures including works by Constable and Turner. The 1890 exhibition at Birmingham of Cox's work included 31 works from the Gaskell collection. Much of it was sold at Christie's in 1909.

Cox drew a number of watercolours featuring bulls in the early 1850s: 'Bathers Disturbed by a Bull' (Whitworth Art Gallery, dated 1853), `Mountain Scene, North Wales, with Bull and Two Youths' (Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston), `On the Moors, near Bettws-y-Coed' (V & A, depicting a bull in a storm) and `The Challenge' (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1853).