According to the Japanese calendar, Yasuo Kuniyoshi was born in the Year of the Cow. He painted numerous scenes of the animal, explaining, “I felt very near to the cow… According to legend, I believed my fate to be guided, more or less, by the bovine kingdom.” For his distinctive painting style, he drew from European Modernism (seen here in the distorted, unconventional perspective) and American folk art (evidenced by the flattened, simplified shapes of the boy’s head and body).