26 AMERICAN CATTLE. 



them with the rough, long hair necessary for their protection, 

 so usually represented in their portraits by the artists of more 

 civilized nations. 



In the modern world, among the more highly cultivated 

 classes of society, in polite literature it has been considered 

 vulgar to talk of cattle, or to illustrate them other than as 

 appendages to scenery, landscape, and rural representations 

 among a rude and uncultivated people. So, too, with artists. 

 The latter have composed cattle scenes, and introduced them as 

 accessory to landscapes in their paintings, and so grossly have 

 they misrepresented their forms for "artistic effect," as to cari- 

 cature and give the ugliest appearances to them. Claude Lor- 

 raine, Salvator Rosa, Poussin, and others of the most celebrated 

 schools of landscape painting of olden time, as well as Paul 

 Potter, Van Ostade, and others of more modern date, made their 

 cows, bulls, and oxen vulgar and uncouth in shape, and wretched 

 in condition. Even landscape painters of the present day, with 

 a silly affectation of "art," will put nothing resembling the 

 noble contour of our improved cattle into a picture, but select 

 some unhappy brute, depleted with poverty, and unkempt, as 

 a wild buffalo in appearance, to give piquancy and effect to their 

 drawings. For such slanderers of these noble animals, we have 

 no respect whatever, nor for the taste of artists in the way 

 of cattle, while yielding an unqualified admiration to their 

 fidelity and skill in other subjects. 



Our modern animal painters have done better. Landseer, and 

 Herring, among the English artists, have accorded somewhat of 

 justice to their objects, while some of the Continental, and 

 American artists in that line, have drawn our improved domestic 

 animals cattle as well as others with admirable truth and 

 fairness. 



The ancients had a high respect and admiration for their cattle. 

 We cannot admire the Egyptian worship of their ox, apis a 



