Ross Butler

Ross Butler was known as the world's leading livestock artist, a Canadian painter whose standardized breed portraits shaped how farmers and breed committees pictured an ideal specimen. Rising to prominence in the 1930s painting cattle and horses for breed committees, he was commissioned in 1939 by Canada's education and agriculture ministries to produce a series of more than five hundred "Standard Type" paintings for schools across the country, depicting four dairy breeds, the Holstein, Jersey, Guernsey and Ayrshire, and two draft horse breeds, the Percheron and Clydesdale. Beyond his art he founded the "Central Unit," Canada's first independent, all-breed artificial insemination facility for cattle, and was a founding father of the Oxford Jersey Club and founder of the Oxford Historical and Museum Society. He was inducted into the Ontario Agricultural Hall of Fame and the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame in 1997, both posthumously.