William Henry Howe decorated a door in the Griswold House parlor in the summer of 1901 with a Normandy bull lying in a stable (below).

Howe was so famous a painter of cattle that the other artists must have known he would portray a cow or bull, even though such an image was inappropriate for a formal living room. They may have been surprised, however, that he reproduced a painting he had shown ten years earlier at the Paris Salon. Monarch of the Farm had been so popular a work there that Howe must have liked the notion of painting it again in Old Lyme.

Howe’s panel “opens” the parlor to a stable with an opening of its own in the far end, which carries a viewer’s eye even deeper into space. The illusion of depth is furthered by the horizontal lines that delineate a wall of the stable in the manner of linear perspective, the traditional device of artists from the time of the Renaissance to give a sense of depth to a flat surface. We see the “monarch” in one of his peaceful moments, but the realistically detailed modeling of his form speaks of a powerful creature that one would never want to rile. We are glad to have a door between us, in case his mood changes. Howe himself made sure that he always painted a bull from behind a barrier like a stone wall. Since he finished his pictures in the studio, he could add any setting he liked. Notice his nice touch of having a shaft of light slant downward toward the bull’s white head.

After painting the majestic bull on a door in Florence Griswold’s parlor in 1901, Howe moved to the back of the house and at some point painted the door leading into the dining room. Perhaps because Matilda Browne had already portrayed two calves on a door nearby, Howe chose a scene like those he had witnessed in the 1880s in the Dutch village of Scheveningen on the North Sea (above), where the fishing fleet employed unusual flat-bottomed boats known as bomschuiten, which were dragged onto the beach to dock.

Artists had been painting this picturesque village and its charming fishing boats for centuries. When this door is closed, the entire dining room is encircled in painted panels.

Howe transformed the flat panels of the door into a window that takes one out to open sea where boats are following one another in a kind of formation. Their sails are in various states, but the three vessels all seem intent on the same destination. With so much foam on the water and heavy dark clouds overhead, they could be heading to shore to escape a coming storm – note how the wind tears at the orange flags atop each mast. A tonalist painter, Howe has employed a limited palette of grays and browns, sharpened with patches of white from bottom to top, to create a scene with a dramatic flair. Tonalist landscapes usually have an air of melancholy or they inspire meditation, but this tonalist seascape, with its turbulent big sky and a sense of movement, has a more invigorating effect.

Howe’s marine scene adds a special flair to the art that adorns the dining room and demonstrates the versatility of this famous painter of cows. Perhaps he knew that these boats were about to become history, for a series of bad storms had convinced both the fishermen and the many bathers who flocked to Scheveningen’s beaches to build a protective harbor. On its completion in 1904, the bomschuiten were almost instantly replaced by more modern ships.

The culture and climate of northern Europe captured the imagination of other Old Lyme artists as well. Henry Ward Ranger painted a coastal scene titled Dutch Harbor (c. 1890) and Henry Rankin Poore painted a canal scene inspired by a northern European city (both pictured in gallery below). Howe’s exhibition history and prize list is long and impressive, dating from the early 1880s to about 1920. He had studied at the Royal Academy in Düsseldorf, Germany, and with several important artists in Paris. He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Design in the 1890s and was named a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. In his early years, before “Howe’s Cows” had become famous, he had also found time to be a businessman, engaged in cabinetry and wood turning.