William Henry Howe made a name for himself in France and the United States as a painter of animals. His farm scenes provided patrons with an antidote to the unnerving changes in American society brought about by industrialization. The prize bull and placid cow in these paintings evoke the patriarchal and matriarchal roles of a nineteenth-century household, and hark back to an ideal of agrarian America that seemed distant from the urban bustle of the Gilded Age.