The White Cow

Albert Lugardon (1827-1909) was born in Rome. He first trained with his father, the painter Jean-Léonard Lugardon (1801-1884) and later became the student of Ary Scheffer in Paris. He won a prize in Geneva in 1855 and exhibited regularly since then in Geneva and in Switzerland.

This painting is a fine example of Lugardon's animal paintings, a category for which he was most praised by the critics. 19th-century painters favoured the depiction of rural subject matters resulting from the direct observation of nature. This trend emerged in France in the 1840s with the so-called Realist movement but also results from a revived interest in 17th-century Dutch imagery. This type of pictures was particularly popular in the second half of the 19th century.