Farm animals have been a feature of settled human life for thousands of years. The Nativity story, for example, features shepherds and their sheep, an ox and an ass, as important witnesses of this much-portrayed event. Artists have always celebrated the productivity of the countryside, from the Italian Renaissance to the war artists of the Second World War. Seventeenth-century Holland, whose wealth depended on agriculture and fishing, produced early masters of animal painting such as Aelbert Cuyp and Paulus Potter.