Paulus Potter   
(1625-1654)

Potter specialized in animal paintings. His horses and cattle are so individual that it is said of Potter that he painted portraits of them.

Before he died at twenty-nine, worn out by excessive work, Paul Potter was already famous, and even more extraordinary, he was prosperous.  Few of the great Dutch masters enjoyed any distinction.  Potter also was unique in that he developed at the very early age of fifteen.

His first lessons were received from his father, a landscape and figure painter of mediocre talents.  When Paul was six years old his father moved from Enkhuizen, where the boy was born in 1625, to Amsterdam, and afterward to The Hague.

Paul was placed under a good master; but work in the studio did not interest him.

He was chiefly his own teacher, and the greater part of time was devoted to making studies from nature. Almost from the first he was interested in animals; but he became a master of landscape because of its necessity as a background.

Potter fell in love with Andriana, the daughter of a neighbor, and they married.

To speak about Paul Potter in the same breath as other accomplished Dutch artists seems like artistic blasphemy.  Potter had an exaggerated reputation as a painter of cattle, though possessed of considerable skill as a draftsman.  His paintings accentuate physical appearance, rather than the beauty of form of the subject.

He never had a color sense, never knew how to produce a decorative surface.  His view of nature is hard, literal, harshly realistic, and devoid of charm.  He could get little beauty out of sunlight or shadow, out of atmosphere or sky, out of cattle or humanity.  He drew with a rasping wire-edged brush and by exaggerated modeling produced a "stand out" effect in his cattle that made people stare. It is, however, not the object of painting to make objects stand out, but to make them stand in.

Potter's reputation was great during his lifetime, and probably increased by his early death.  So large was the demand for his pictures that the supply was soon exhausted, and the obliging art dealers of Amsterdam forged his name on works by other artists and sold them as Potters.