Baby and Toy Cow

Baby and Toy Cow is an ink, pen, and drybrush drawing on paper, signed 'KUNIYOSHI 21' and dated circa 1921, now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum (1992.11.22; bequest of Edith and Milton Lowenthal) and reproduced as the frontispiece of William Murrell's 1922 monograph Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the first book ever devoted to the artist. The image — a baby seated beside a toy cow, the two figures drawn with the bold, simplified contour line of folk drawing — belongs to the cluster of cow and child compositions that Kuniyoshi made between 1921 and 1923 in Maine and in New York and that gave him his earliest critical reputation. Kuniyoshi was born in 1889, the Year of the Ox in the East Asian zodiac, and he repeatedly told friends that he felt himself spiritually 'guided by the bovine kingdom'; the cow appears in his early oils (Little Joe with the Cow, Boy with Cow, Milking Girl) and in many drawings of the same years as a kind of personal totem and self-portrait device. The drawing's spare, calligraphic line and its slightly archaic flat space connect the artist's American training in Kenneth Hayes Miller's figure classes at the Art Students League with his memories of childhood imagery from rural Okayama. The Brooklyn Museum drawing is the most widely reproduced of his early works on paper and remains a touchstone for the early Kuniyoshi cow imagery.