"The Cup Pen of Pigs," engraved by E. Hacker, 1874. Note the pigs' snouts resting on wooden "pillows" to keep them from suffocating in their own folds of fat.

 

Farm Animal Portraits Of England

 

Fat Was In During A Period Of Extraordinary Experimentation

In The Breeding Of Farm Animals

It wasn't just a contest, though. The population was increasing rapidly, and people were moving off the land into towns and cities. That caused an increase in the demand for meats, and farm animal owners rose to the challenge.

The competition to breed the largest cattle, pigs and poultry was fierce during this hugely popular period of experimentation. Pigs were bred so fat they could not stand on their own, and cows weighing some 2,800 pounds toured the country on exhibition.

Today the demand for lean meat results in our livestock looking much different, so it is hard for us to believe these grotesquely large animals ever existed. But they did.

We find these animals -- many now extinct, endangered or evolved beyond recognition -- fondly remembered in livestock portraits of the day, virtually the only record of an all-but-vanished agricultural heritage.

Enter Elspeth Moncrieff's new book, Farm Animal Portraits in Britain 1780-1900, published by the Antique Collectors' Club of Suffolk, England. This extensively illustrated, 300-page tome examines the development of farm animal paintings in both the agricultural and historical context, looking closely at the artists, many of them little-known, who specialized in the genre.

The paintings of livestock were commissioned by proud breeders to impress friends, clients and the world at large, and the hundreds of illustrations within this book have been gathered together from museums and private collections, ranging from stately mansions in England to humble cottages.

The superstar of the day -- that is, the most famous animal in all the land because of its size -- was the "Durham Ox." A print of this giant beast, done in 1802 by John Boultbee, sold 2,000 within a year and was hung in homes, inns and coaching houses. The animal's image even made its way onto an entire blue and white Staffordshire dinner service.

The ox's owner sent the celebrated animal from one agricultural fair to another -- and pocketed a portion of the admission fees.

"The Durham Ox toured the country in a specially constructed carriage which was drawn by four horses; if the going was tough, six horses had to be resorted to," writes Ms Moncrieff, who wrote Farm Animal Portraits with help from Stephen and Iona Joseph, specialists in English animal paintings.

There are conflicting accounts as to the weight of the Durham Ox because the "stone," the measuring unit of the time, was not standardized. The ox probably tipped the scales around 2,400 pounds and stood five feet, five inches at the shoulders. Records of its size exist because they were measured by artist George Garrard for his 1802 "A Fat Holderness Ox called the Wonderful Ox (The Durham Ox)."

Despite its size, the Durham Ox appears to have been in good health and would have lived a long life -- he was a show animal and not meant for the dinner table -- except for an untimely accident. In 1807, the ox dislocated a hip bone and had to be slaughtered.

The story of the Durham Ox illustrates the fascination English people had with these large farm animals, why owners would commission artists to paint them, and the effects the new breeding and feeding techniques would have animal husbandry forever.

The man who launched the "improved" breeding methods was a farmer named Robert Bakewell (1725-1795). He experimented with animals' diets and kept meticulous records of their growth. His new breeds of livestock resulted in double the amount of meat using half the feed.

"His aim was to put meat on the table of every family in the country," writes Ms Moncrieff.

Bakewell's advances in livestock breeding became widely known. In a painting by Thomas Weaver, a gigantic white heifer, one of the famous "exhibition" animals, is shown near a shed with a man slicing turnips nearby, illustrating that she was reared in the "new way."

A diet of vegetables, fodder crops, fattening foods, even seaweed, combined with in-breeding and cross-breeding, had a dramatic impact on the size of animals. According to Ms Moncrieff, the average weight at Smithfield market in 1710 for beeves was 370 pounds, for calves 50 pounds, for sheep 28 pounds, and for lambs 18 pounds. Compare those figures with the weights in 1795, 800 pounds for beeves, 148 pounds for calves, 80 pounds for sheep, and 50 pounds for lambs.

One painting, "The Cup Pen of Pigs," by E. Hacker, shows three prize-winning pigs that apparently were so fat they could not sleep without suffocating in their own fat folds. To prevent their nocturnal demise, they are given wooden "pillows" to keep their heads raised.

Why so big? In the Nineteenth Century, a farmer might feed his cattle for seven years so they could attain their largest size. Today cattle destined for the butcher are slaughtered within 18 months to provide leaner, more tender cuts.

These breeding experiments may seem cruel to modern sensibilities, but they did help solve the problem of feeding England's hungry masses and led to more advanced breeding methods.

Many paintings and prints were commissioned by farmers to advertise -- often to a largely illiterate population -- their improved animals and immortalize their triumphs in the show ring. Farmers were anxious to show off not only their "fat" exhibition animals, but also breeding stock valued for pedigree and conformation.

The years 1780 to 1900 were the heyday for artists specializing in portraiture of farm animals. The advertising use of such artwork was only one aspect -- an early one -- of farm animal paintings.

"By the late Eighteenth Century, Britain had already established a unique school of animal painting and many livestock paintings were commissioned out of pride of ownership, or local rivalry, in the same spirit as the horse and dog pictures still hanging in so many country houses today," writes Ms Moncrieff.

This school of painting would lead to many side roads, such as the development of natural history painting. Thomas Bewick's "The Chillingham Wild Bull," circa 1789, shows a wild beast dripping foam from its mouth as it looks at the intruder (the artist). This contrasts with the docile animal portraits of the day and shows the role of the artist as a chronicler of the animal world.

The horse racing and fox hunting prints of John Wootton and George Stubbs were from this period, too.

Many paintings were commissioned by individuals involved with horse racing and foxhunting. (In fact, Bakewell was inspired in his breeding experiments by the selective breeding used to create the thoroughbred race horse.) When horse racing became organized through the efforts of the newly formed Jockey Club (started in 1752), a flood of horse commissions resulted to such artists as John Wootton, James Seymour, Peter Tillemans, John Nost Sartorius and Ben Marshall.

A horse's anatomy is particularly challenging for an artist to capture and early attempts resulted in wooden-looking animals, but "the arrival of George Stubbs and Sawrey Gilpin . . . changed the genre of horse painting forever," says Ms Moncrieff.

Suddenly, everyone wanted to be painted with his favorite hunter or race horse, and it is out of this tradition the livestock paintings were executed Ï owners posing with their favorite cattle or sheep.

Since animal portraiture was the fashion and the country was caught up in agricultural improvement, there grew a natural interest in agricultural landscapes and rural scenes. In Thomas Gainsborough's "Woodcutter Courting A Milkmaid," 1755, two peasants dally over their tasks while a cow stands nearby. The cow is thin with a hollow back -- obviously representative of the old, "unimproved" breed, says Ms Moncrieff.

Country scenes by the likes of John F. Herring and Thomas Sidney Cooper were sold to the Victorian middle classes as nostalgic reminders of the rural life they had left behind when they moved to the cities.

As an art form, animal painting was not considered to be up to the level of history painting or portraiture, according to Ms Moncrieff. But the English loved their animals and embraced the genre. It was said that Dr Johnson "would rather see a portrait of a dog I know than all the allegories you can show me."

Animal artists earned a steady income by their craft. Some like the fashionable London artist James Ward did very well. According to Ms Moncrieff, Ward earned over œ1,000 a year ($200,000 in today's money) doing animal portraits for middle and upper class clients.

The big questions, according to Ms Moncrieff, and to anyone who sees these paintings are: How accurate are they? Could such animals really ever have existed? Were these works exaggerated publicity portraits?

Undoubtedly, some were exaggerated, in the manner that advertising today uses hyperbole to make its point. In a famous quote, the artist Thomas Bewick, who was asked to record some of Robert Colling's animals, says, "I objected to put lumps of fat here and there where I could not see it, at least, not in so exaggerated a way as on the paintings before me." Colling had asked Bewick to fashion his work similar to other paintings of very large animals.

But Bewick is the only artist of the time to make such a protest, and Moncrieff believes many of the portraits are reasonably accurate. She says that today's experts in rare breeds believe that animals could be bred this large again if the market desired it. In some cases the measurements of the animals taken by artists prove the accuracy of their paintings.

Farm Animal Portraits is a marvelous and comprehensive study of this period in livestock experimentation, and of the social and economic conditions that led to the commissioning of the paintings. The book, which has 326 color and 111 black-and-white illustrations, will be attractive to aficionados of folk and primitive art as well as those who enjoy history.

The book was published last October to coincide with a month-long exhibition at William Secord Gallery in New York by Iona Antiques, dealers of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century English animal paintings.

The author worked as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum before becoming an art journalist. She is a freelance writer and art market correspondent for The Art Newspaper. She is also co-author of the A-Z of Antique Hunting, and lives in London with her husband and two sons.

Stephen and Joseph Iona began collecting farm animal paintings 25 years ago and now have one of the finest private collections in the world.

(Farm Animal Portraits in Britain, 1780-1900, by Elspeth Moncrieff with Stephen and Joseph Iona, is published by the Antique Collectors' Club, Wappingers Falls, N.Y., and Suffolk, England; 304 pages, $69.50 hardcover. For ordering information, call 800/252-5231.)