[The following excerpt is taken from the twenty-fifth chapter of D H Laven’s historic work-in-progress 'The Story of Forgotten Art’. In the introduction to this pioneering work he writes: ‘There is no such thing as forgotten art. There are only forgotten artists. And a hell of a lot of them too’. In this passage he looks at the work of Sir Anthony Tosh, an eighteenth century cow painter.]
Many a word I have written on art that has been forgotten. Literally forgotten: thrown into a damp and dingy cellar, burnt on a fiery furnace, tossed into the whiffy wastepaper baskets of history, to the unutterably ghastly gutters of culture’s overcrowded highways and byways; to the edge of the canonical circle – and beyond. Many a word I have written on this type of art. Art which has been and gone – which is no more, is lost, is finished, is but a faint stain on the great carpet of memory.
But there are two ways of forgetting. There is never looking, and there is never looking properly. There is some art, therefore, which is both remembered and forgotten. Art that is in fact well-known, and yet not known at all. Art that hides behind itself; that can be seen and not seen, both at the same time. Such is the art created by the British eighteenth century painter Sir Anthony Tosh.
The last occasion on which I saw Tosh’s work occurred a few months ago at the Cockles Gallery in Malmesbury, where there are as many as twenty seven paintings on permanent display (at the request of the late Edwin Cockles; Tosh’s most fanatic collector). Other than this, I run into the odd example of Tosh’s work relatively regularly – it is not a rare sight, especially in English country houses, where one is likely to find a small Tosh or two hanging above the piano in the drawing room, or in the dark corridor outside the children’s nursery. They are still popular, in so much as they allow a brief flicker of pleasure, such as that which can be gained from the front of a mass produced greetings card in which two ducks join beaks in a moving gesture of avian understanding. Children – aesthetically challenged as they are – tend to admire them, for they contain animals (and animals, for one reason or another, provoke a peculiar veneration from children). Otherwise, they are only mildly interesting works: quaint pastoral scenes that speak of bygone era to which few of us would desire to return.
A recent monograph on Sir Anthony Tosh – written by E H Frontenhaus – confirms our theory of him as a deeply conservative painter, whose focus never extended beyond a view of English cows in an English field with a nice English church in the background. Frontenhaus creates an image of Sir Anthony that simply cannot offend, let alone stir. The painter seems to be the model gentleman; wealthy yet charitable, firm yet affable, a wily businessman with a concrete Christian faith and a serviceable talent for representing cattle in the medium of oil paint. Whichever way you look at it, there are no blemishes upon this porcelain jug; neither inky fingerprints, nor greasy smudges, nor irregular surfaces. Sir Anthony Tosh was a roundly sensible fellow. To cement the argument, consider the evidence put forth by Frontenhaus at the end of Chapter One: ‘It is well documented that Sir Anthony read the lesson at All Saint’s Horsley Down no less than two hundred and twelve times’. I withdraw any cynical doubts that might have lingered like coffee grounds in the dirty mug of my mind: this was indeed a saintly man.
A saintly man – who painted cows. Why not? After all, as Frontenhaus kindly reminds us, cows ‘were there’. Fancy that – so they were. Had Sir Tosh painted giraffes, one supposes that we might have found him altogether more interesting. Yet he didn’t. He painted cows: obsessively, continually, constantly, eternally and always. But that’s not especially strange is it? Not if they were ‘there’. Then again, couldn’t we say that a lot of things were ‘there’ – things which don’t appear in Tosh’s paintings: things like chickens, like sheep, like young girls in petticoats, old dames in mourning dress, men in their bowlers, horses, carriages, marriages, funerals and bluebells. But did he paint any of these things? The answer dwells in the region of the negative.
The first commandment of art history: what isn’t there reinforces the significance of what is.
And what is there? Cows, fields and churches. And are they there just because they are ‘there’? One suspects otherwise. Indeed, even our good friend Frontenhaus has followed us as far as this, stating at the end of Chapter Two that the artist ‘does seem to have been somewhat preoccupied by the image of cattle in a field in front of a church’. Preoccupied is an understatement, but firstly we must ask how it is that Frontenhaus explains away this so-called ‘preoccupation’. The answer is that he doesn’t. ‘Men have their fancies’ he concludes. Now, whilst I would not wish to debate the validity of this prudent proclamation, I must in this case take issue with its usage.
Again: it is not a case of forgetting the object itself, but forgetting how to interpret the object. As it is with Tosh’s paintings, so too with one of the primary sources regarding his life. I refer to the parish church records in which Frontenhaus discovered the ‘true nature of Sir Anthony’s dedicated faith’ – namely the figures relating to our subject’s copious lesson reading achievements. To begin with, Frontenhaus must be congratulated for adding up all of the references. However, one can only suppose that his accomplishments in this area led to a false sense of triumph, fogging the sea of his brain and, in the long run, turning his attention away from making the next vital step towards the lighthouse of truth. The man may have counted every lesson that Sir Anthony read at church, but what he failed to do was to check the content of each of these lessons. An excusable error, maybe, were it not for the frightening significance of the subsequent findings – which I have since unearthed.
Sir Anthony Tosh read the lesson two hundred and twelve times, over a period of thirty years. When you space that out over the amount of church services he must have attended in this time (almost two thousand by my calculations) it is not as great an achievement as it sounds. This is hardly surprising, for Sir Anthony’s lesson-reading habit was driven by a dark secret, the nature of which would surely have been revealed by unmanaged exposure. What we have here is a case of carefully handled heresy: he did enough to hoodwink later generations into supposing that he was a dedicated Christian, whilst finding multiple opportunities in which to indulge in his particular brand of profanation. And the evidence for this accusation is nothing short of overwhelming, though Frontenhaus may have missed it. The fact of the matter is this: every single one of the lessons read by Sir Tosh contained either the words ‘cow’, ‘ox’, ‘calf’ or (more rarely) ‘bull’. Considering the relative paucity of these words within the holy text, added to the fact that we are talking about two hundred and twelve consecutive occurrences, this simply cannot be considered as a coincidence.
When scrutinised from a third angle, the mystery continues its mould-like expansion. Why, we must ask, do such detailed records even exist? Was it really necessary for the reader of every lesson to be noted in church records? The answer to this question surely lies in the identity of the person who was keeping these records. This turns out to have been a certain Mrs. Patricia Greenhalgh, the organist and, as it happens, the wife of a local dairy farmer. The plot thickens, á la beef soup. Might she also have been the author of a hitherto unexplained letter found by researchers within Sir Tosh’s personal papers, signed ‘with undying love, from your little cow-pat’? Need I say it, the foregoing is as steamy as the proverbial freshly planted dung-pile; leading one to the inevitable conclusion that Sir Anthony must have had some sort of ‘relations’ with the woman in question.
In my opinion, the relationship between Mrs Greenhalgh and Sir Anthony Tosh was more than just sexual. They were conspiring not only against Mr Greenhalgh (Sir Anthony was, of course, unmarried) but also against the religious faith of the Horsely Down community. Mrs Greenhalgh recorded the instances of Sir Anthony’s church readings in order to reveal to subsequent generations the part that he was playing in the propagation of a religious cult. In her faith she no doubt believed that these future generations would have long seen the light and would now have cause to praise Sir Anthony for his dedication. Instead of this, we find ourselves in a world in which the religious cult of which he was a part has – as far as I know – long sunk without trace.
For the first mention of the Bovite sect, we must go back to fifteenth century Holland and, ironically, the works of another painter, who we now know as the ‘Master of the Golden Calf’. In the half a dozen or so small paintings by this mediocre Flemish craftsman, we are presented with an instantly recognisable Biblical subject treated in an exceptionally irregular manner. The story follows the progress of the Israelites during Moses’ prolonged excursion up Mount Sinai (Exodus, ch.32) Frustrated by their leader’s absence, his people take the advice of a fellow named Aaron and build themselves a calf out of molten gold, around which they dance a joyous jig. Up to this point, the Master of the Golden Calf presents the story adhering closely to the text. In-between here, however, and the moment when Moses (at God’s suggestion) cuts short his divine conversation, the artist makes an unconventional decision. Rather than see Moses’ anger as being provoked by the people’s sinfulness, he chooses to suggest that it is Moses who has got it wrong, on account of a personal aversion to cows (implicated in an earlier passage). From here on in, things get increasingly unusual, as Moses is left behind at the foot of the mountain and the people march onto the Promised land with their golden calf intact and with a second commandment that, instead of reading ‘You shall not make yourself an idol’ reads ‘You shall worship cows above all other creatures on the earth, for it is they that best reflect the form of the Almighty’.
From what source might the Master of the Golden Calf found the inspiration for such an unbelievable departure from the Bible truth? One possibility is the Gospel of Ranaballus, a damaged set of scrolls discovered on a beach outside Bremerhaven in 1202 which tells the life of Jesus through the eyes of Ranaballus – a ox farmer – as well as featuring numerous digressions on Old Testament scripture, shedding new light on the diversity of religious thought around at the beginning of the first century AD. Unfortunately, these scrolls no longer exist, but the odd reference to the Ranabullus Gospel can still be found throughout the Middle Ages. It is also possible that Bovite belief was based on a misunderstanding between Hinduism and Christianity – but I am inclined to doubt this theory, based as it is on a simplistic interpretation of the bovine symbol that they have in common.
In either case, Bovite thought was clearly already plodding around in the fifteenth century – as it was beyond this time. However, after the Master of the Golden Calf few believers were as keen to reveal their faith to the world in such a direct manner. They resorted instead to more subtle methods of displaying their heretical faith; the ultimate result of which can be witnessed in Sir Anthony Tosh’s abundant cow paintings. Before him, yet, we can see the mark of Bovite thought in painters such as Aelbert Cuyp, who often combined the image of a cow with that of a church in the background – a visual statement regarding his belief that the church ought not to have at its centre images of people, but of cows. Strangely, art historians are prone to misinterpret this rather blatant statement, arguing that the cow in Cuyp’s paintings was in fact a symbol of national pride: the pictures thus revealing the dualistic aspect of Dutch society in the Golden Age, based on the combined success of trade and the church. I believe this to be nonsense. The truth is that Cuyp was a fanatical Bovite: a staunch cow worshipper. The readiness with which Sir Anthony Tosh was willing to quote from Cuyp’s work only serves to underline this proposal. Ardent Bovite as he was, Tosh would not have wanted to link his own work with that of another’s unless there was a good reason for it.
Yet, like the proverbial frogs (themselves the subject of heretical worship) we are hopping ahead of ourselves. How did the Bovite cult spread from Cuyp’s seventeenth century Holland to Tosh’s eighteenth century England? The answer is, via Hereford. It was here that a certain Jan and Clara Frenger fled in 1706, having been charged in Ghent on the count of witchcraft (they were both discovered one night kissing a calf whilst balancing cherries on their head, as part of a complex Bovite ritual). Clara, as it happens, was pregnant and, no sooner had they arrived in Hereford than she gave birth to a son, who was named Sebastian. She died shortly after, but her husband Jan stayed true to her last words beseeching that he might give Sebastian a ‘good Bovite education’. In fact, Jan gave his son such a good Bovite education that he grew up to be cattle farmer. It was in this capacity that he met Sir Anthony Tosh in 1734. Anthony was in Hereford to visit a distant relation who was trying to sue him out of his inheritance. Sir Tosh thought he might soften the old woman up by presenting her with a newborn calf. It is not known whether he succeeded in this regard, but it is almost certain that this date marks his first contact with the Bovite cult – of which he was soon to become a key member.
Before we proceed any further, it would be wise to take a look at one of Sir Anthony’s paintings, wherein we shall easily spy the seeds of his sacrilegious philosophy.
Sir A. Tosh ‘Country Scene with Cows’. Oil on Panel. 1746
The church of Horsely Down – leaning slightly – looms large over an early spring landscape, in which the only signs of life are a group of brown cows, the hair on their back tinged with gold in the light of the late morning sun. The link between the cows and the church is made between those two standing closest to the viewer, the lines between them and the building forming that fondly fashionable compositional device, the triangle. This supports the Bovite theory that the foundations of the modern church should be laid upon the image of two cows. The fact that the church is leaning suggests that in its present state it does not have solid foundations. The message is emphatic: until Christians accept the significance of cows to their faith, their churches will be wonky.
‘Country Scene with Cows’: The Compositional Triangle
A further delicate detail reinforces the ties between cow and church, as shown below. Notice how, when turned upside down, the four legs of the cow mimic the architecture at the top of the church tower. The cow is the church, the painter is saying.
Through this one example, it is not hard to see how Tosh’s Bovite beliefs are embedded within the fabric of his paintings. This method can just as easily be employed on any of his works, not least the largest of these – his self-confessed masterpiece – ‘May Dance’, which hangs in the central hall of the aforementioned Cockles Gallery in Malmesbury. The title of this painting is not original: it is in fact based on a severe misunderstanding, which Frontenhaus, in all his ignorance, repeats in his recent study. As usual, we are faced with a church, a field and several cows. However, in a rare departure for Tosh, the so-called ‘May Dance’ also includes human figures, a circle of young woman dancing around what Frontenhaus describes as a ‘stone’. To be fair to him, the object in the centre of the dancing girls is indeed hard to make out; nonetheless, I am entirely confident in my opinion that it represents not a stone, but a young calf. Considering this, what we are looking at here is not a simple ‘may dance’, such as that which any young village woman might have taken part in the mid-eighteenth century, but an echo of the Biblical ‘dance around the golden calf’, involving a group of young female Bovites led, I suspect, by none other than Mrs Greenhalgh herself (I refer in this case to the figure wearing the green cardigan).
This reading is supported by the possibility that this work may have been commissioned by Stephen Frenger, from whose son Edwin Cockles seems to have bought it in the early nineteenth century, as described in a letter from Mr Cockles to his wife in 1807:
‘My dear Elisabet,
You cannot guess the warmth in my heart. I have been in the company of a young fellow named Frengier (sic), who has shown me a work he owns by Sir Tosh, which he has agreed to allow me to purchase, on the grounds that I present him with the items of jewellery with which you entrusted me on the trip in the hope that I would have them valued. With much joy, I concurred to the fellow’s wishes, knowing full well that you would forgive me this small cruelty, the painting being such a good one. It shows many young maydens (sic) dancing, along with some admirable cows. I know that you will like it, for it is well done in very aspect.
Your dear Edwin’
We can only presume that Stephen Frenger’s son did not follow his father so willingly in supping the heretical milk of Bovite values and belief. Indeed, considering the lack of understanding surrounding Sir Tosh’s paintings in the succeeding centuries, it is to be presumed that few- if any -ambassadors of the Bovite belief survived to propagate their irregular faith. In fact, though I am inclined to believe that there may still be a Bovite or two living on this eccentric earth, it would certainly be correct to say that the closest any of us shall come to making contact with his curious heretical group will be through looking at any of Sir Anthony Tosh’s paintings. As I hope to have shown, these works, far from being completely forgotten in a literal sense, nevertheless contain a forgotten meaning, revealing them to be much much more than mere ‘paintings of cows’.
D H Laven 2006
