Little Joe with the Cow

Little Joe with the Cow (1923) is among the most celebrated paintings of Yasuo Kuniyoshi's early career, an oil on canvas (71.1 × 106.7 cm) painted in his second summer at the Maine artists' colony of Ogunquit and now in the collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. The painting depicts a small boy — 'Little Joe' — at the center of the composition, his arm draped around the neck of a large brown cow whose head turns toward the viewer with the long, faintly melancholy stare that became Kuniyoshi's signature bovine attribute. The flat, slightly tilted ground, the slightly elongated proportions of both child and cow, and the rolling Maine farmland that recedes behind them combine the structured figure-drawing Kuniyoshi had learned from Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League with the simplified, fable-like spatial handling of Japanese folk art that he carried with him from his Okayama childhood. The cow is at the center of an intricate web of personal meaning in his early work — Kuniyoshi was born in 1889, the Year of the Ox in the East Asian zodiac, and he repeatedly described himself as 'guided by the bovine kingdom' — and Little Joe with the Cow, with its quiet, tender embrace between child and animal, is the largest and most public of the cow paintings of his early 1920s. The picture was first owned by Wright Ludington of Santa Barbara, California, and entered the Crystal Bridges collection in the early twenty-first century; it is regularly published as one of the major American paintings of the period.