The docile bull served in the seventeenth century as a popular image to represent the Continent of Europe. It recalled the guise adopted by Jupiter in his seduction of Europa, the Phoenician princess, as related in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Ovid also recounts the history of Jupiter's love Io, who was transformed into a heifer to conceal her from Juno.

This delightful model, while recalling classical mythology, also reflects the seventeenth-century Dutch taste for decorative pictures of landscapes with cows. In England, the eighteenth-century popularity for silver cow jugs is also credited to Dutch taste.

Imitations of Delftware figures are rarely found in Japanese porcelain. Other known models are of horses and 'Dutchmen on a barrel' (see lot 37).