How the genre of agricultural livestock art became so popular

A visitor favourite at the Art Gallery of Ballarat is an 1887 oil painting of a man in a top hat standing next to what can only be described as an absolute unit of a cow.

The rectangular beast — built like a proverbial brick shithouse — elicits a giggle from even the most serious gallery-goer.

But the title, Henry Stone and his Durham Ox, does little to explain why such a painting was made in the first place.

If we look through the pages of art history, we can find several other artworks showcasing enormous livestock.

So what’s the deal with this niche genre of painting I’m calling “Big Cow”?

Ballarat’s ox

Thomas Flintoff was an English-born painter and photographer who spent time in the US before following the gold rush to Victoria in 1853.

He set up a photography and painting studio in Ballarat where he made portraits of locals, and eventually relocated to Melbourne.

Near the end of his life, he executed the 1.2-metre-wide oil painting of Henry Stone — a wealthy Melbourne butcher — standing with an enormous red bull.

But this painting was no novelty. In fact, it was a very specific reference to a legendary animal from 100 years earlier.

The history of Big Cow art

Since the dawn of time, humans have painted animals.

Indeed, the “Big Cow” genre can be dated as far back as the Upper Palaeolithic period: the famous Lascaux Cave in France contains more than 30 paintings of bulls, the largest measuring over five metres long.

The Lascaux artists painted wild animals though, as it wasn’t until 10,000 years ago that humans began domesticating cattle in the Middle East.

Humanity’s reverence for large cattle had always been linked to the ancient knowledge that big cow equals more food, but with the invention of farming came the realisation that more cow food equals bigger cow.

But it wasn’t until the 18th century that a boom in selective breeding and animal science really took off in Europe, bringing about new, specially-bred bovine of truly phenomenal proportions.

The OG Durham Ox 

In March, 1796 a calf was born on the Ketton Hall estate in Brafferton, north-east England. He was an early Shorthorn, a type of cattle bred specifically to grow to a gargantuan size.

Units of measurement were sometimes inconsistent (or prone to exaggeration) back then, but it’s estimated this steer — who became known as the “Durham Ox” — weighed in at more than 1700kg. That’s the same as an SUV.

British livestock was going through a boom at the time. The introduction of turnip crops in the 1730s had provided a source of food for cows over the winter, allowing farmers to keep fattening their herds up for longer before sending them to slaughter.

The Durham Ox was a particularly juicy specimen. 

In 1801 he was purchased by a travelling showman-agriculturalist named John Day who toured the creature all over the country, turning a nice profit on ticket sales.

It’s hard to believe that in the early 19th century people really lined up and paid their hard-earned pennies to see a big cow (I guess they didn’t have social media). 

But part of John Day’s genius marketing strategy was getting the image of the beast out there in front of the public’s eyeballs.

Not only did he sell merchandise at his shows, but artists were invited to make paintings, drawings, and (most importantly) prints of the Durham Ox, which circulated far and wide — as far as the fledgling colonies on the other side of the world.

To viewers in the 1880s, Thomas Flintoff’s painting in the Art Gallery of Ballarat was making a very clear reference to the original Durham Ox, telling us that this agricultural icon remained ingrained in people’s memories for at least a century. 

It’s telling, too, that although Thomas Flintoff was also a photographer, he was asked to paint Stone’s animal, not photograph it. 

On one hand, an oil painting better replicates the style of the images of the original Durham Ox (who lived long before the invention of the camera). On the other hand, the painter is better placed to manipulate and exaggerate reality, while the photographer is more tethered to it.

Replicating the style of English agricultural paintings — decades after the invention of photography had made this type of image redundant — was also a way for colonial Victoria to assert its ties to the old world. 

Indeed, the landscape in which Henry Stone and his tractor-sized ox stand barely looks recognisable as Australia.

A Ballarat icon

Since it was acquired by the Art Gallery of Ballarat in 1979, Henry Stone and his Durham Ox has been a favourite of locals and visitors alike.

And just as Thomas Flintoff referenced the original Durham Ox in his 1887 painting, contemporary Australian artists have even incorporated the iconic silhouette of Henry Stone’s bull into their works, giving new life to this prodigious beast.

Joan Ross’s 2024 digital collage Bella Arat uses Flintoff’s Ox to playfully interrogate the ways the Victorian landscape has been shaped by colonialism, while Anna Glynn’s 2020 watercolour, Flintoff swallows von Guerard critiques the canon of Australian landscape painting and reflects the sublimation of nature by two centuries of agriculture.