I bought this painted tile in Amsterdam about 15 years ago. (Most of the damage occurred after I bought it, but that’s not relevant.) There was a tag on it that says it dates from about 1740, along with the text “Cow ‘spinnekoppen’ Dutch”. I think “spinnekoppen” is Dutch for “spider”, so I don’t understand the relevance of that.
There has been a lot of speculation in my family about what the scene is supposed to depict. My theory, not shared by anyone else, is that it is showing a cow escaping from his farm and heading into town. The cross-shaped structure at the left would then be part of a broken fence, although it’s not a very good representation of a fence. The two objects at the far left might be ships on the sea, which seem unrelated to the scene and don’t actually look much like ships, with unreasonably tall and strange shaped masts sticking up above the sails. Any better theories?
The only thing I can offer is real bonkers: the “two ships” seem to be morphing into a three fingered claw gripping the top of that leaning tombstone-looking thing. I know I need new glasses but there you have it.
They look more like a bishop’s mitre to me. Combined with the cross-like object, I suspect this is some kind of editorial-cartoon type thing. The cow represents Protestants breaking away from the confines of the Catholic church, or something.
That’s one trouble with this sort of primitivist (if that’s a term) art, which is that the rendering of it is not very skillful, in terms of making items recognizable.
For the things we can probably all agree on: in the background on the right is a building that is probably a farmhouse and one or more outbuildings. In the foreground is probably a pond or swampy area with grass and maybe a couple of rocks. The figure in the center is an animal with hooves, possibly male (it has what looks like a penis), with four legs and a tail. The legs look peculiar to me, I don’t think that’s the way a 4-legged hooved animal would walk, but I’m no expert. Maybe it’s supposed to be running.
My first thought regarding the wooden object on the left was that it was some kind of wagon, to which perhaps the animal had been hitched, and the animal had kicked it over and partially broken it up in order to escape from it. But the animal is carrying no traces of any kind of hitching apparatus, so that is perhaps doubtful. So that stuff might be a fence with a gate, that has been partly destroyed and the posts pulled out of the ground by the animal.
I can’t make anything out of those objects on the left, there just aren’t enough recognizable clues for my eyes to be able to resolve it into anything.
It kind of looks like a spider to me. I mean, yeah, it’s missing four legs (among other things), but that could just be artistic license. On the left side, I make out two chimneys inflating a giant chef’s hat. On the right side, some sentient buildings – perhaps once human beings, now horribly mutated? - in a post-apocalyptic environment are baffled by how much the spider looks like a cow. Alien fauna (possibly rogue scientists performing unethical experiments on other worlds) observe from the corners. I read it as some kind of statement for or against the use of extraterrestrial technology in global food processing. I must say I think the artist could have made the point more clearly and compellingly with a better rendering of the arachnid.
And don’t forget that the bovine has scales along the front of its neck, two big slashes along its side, a mullet, and its left rear leg is twisted into a corkscrew.
Yeah, I saw that from Google too, but I don’t think it’s correct. Wiktionary says spinnekop is “spider”. I think the “kop” part is cognate with the obsolete English cob = “spider”, as in cobweb. Also note attercop (used by Tolkien in The Hobbit). The OED says this about the etymology of attercop, which incidentally mentions that Dutch spinne-cop is “spider”.
Old English attorcoppa, < átor, attor, poison + coppa, derivative of cop top, summit, round head, or copp cup, vessel; in reference to the supposed venomous properties of spiders. Compare also Dutch spinne-cop ‘spider,’ and cobweb n., formerly cop-webbe; whence it appears probable that the simple coppa was itself = ‘spider.’
But I don’t see how this picture is related to spiders.
A Google Image search of the painted tile suggests it’s typical of Delft Blue tile. The Royal Delft Museum has workshops in which people as young as seven years old can paint such tiles. So what we’re looking at is very likely done by an amateur, possibly a young one.
Also, some of them do feature ships in the background and whatever the cow appears to be standing on shows up in most of them, so I’m guessing that’s decoration or otherwise unrelated to the animal (I was thinking it may have been a yoke).
ETA, I see another one in there with the exact same background but a person with a fishing rod instead of the cow. In that one (and some of the others) you can see that the objects in the back left are boats.
My sense is that this is an ox, aka a steer, as it has a penis but no balls and also no udder. The face is the kind of cow face people draw if they have never thought about what a cow face looks like (I’m artist with some experience watching people try to draw). I think the object right behind it is a broken cart with the shaft sticking up. In the background to the left is a village with trees and houses. The things that could be ships or even gravestones on the right are a mystery.
Take a look at my link. On the left are ships, on the right is a house (or maybe a church). Most of the pictures in that link are very similar, with varying degrees of abstractness. In the clearer pictures you can get a better idea of the objects in the background and, at least IMO, they’re the same things in this picture.
