Jan de Haas was a masterful painter of cows, producing landscapes with prosperous red-and-white and Frisian cattle and other robustly modelled animals. The landscape is clearly secondary to the animals in his work. Following in the footsteps of Willem Roelofs, with whom he had become acquainted in Oosterbeek, De Haas moved to Brussels in 1857, making regular trips back to the Netherlands to gain inspiration. He is also known to have painted the livestock in many pictures by Willem Roelofs, P.J.C. Gabriel and J.Th. Abels.