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Creator:
Tom Wood, born 1955
Title:

Cock and Bull, a Portrait of Teddy

Date:
2013
Medium:
Oil on panel
Dimensions:
Overall: 50 × 48 inches (127 × 121.9 cm)
Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Gift of the Artist
Copyright Status:
© The Artist
Accession Number:
B2018.29
Classification:
Paintings
Collection:
Paintings and Sculpture
Subject Terms:
animal art | bull | chickens | field | hens | literary theme | rooster | The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)
Access:
Not on view
Note: To make an appointment to see this work, please contact the Paintings and Sculpture department at ycba.paintings@yale.edu. Please visit the Paintings and Sculpture collections page on our website for more details.
Link:
https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:78937
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To celebrate the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), writer and vicar of Coxwold, North Yorkshire, the Laurence Sterne Trust at Shandy Hall commissioned Tom Wood to produce new work for an exhibition. "Cock and Bull" is taken from the last line of Sterne’s picaresque masterpiece Tristram Shandy (1759): "A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick—And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard." Here, Wood depicts a local prize bull, Teddy, along with cockerels. Wood references the British tradition of painting champion animals in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when landowners, farmers, and stockmen were intensifying efforts to produce better livestock through selective breeding. As such, it asks questions about bloodlines and national identity, alluding to "John Bull," the bluff, assertive, anti-intellectual personification of England that emerged in the eighteenth century.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2020

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