Paulus Potter – The Young Bull (1647) Public Domain
Dear Readers, I’m always intrigued by artists who choose to make animals their subject – partly because of what it says about the attitude to animals at the time, and partly because the best painters seem to be able to incorporate the personality of the animal in such a way that it becomes a portrait. Back in the 17th Century, Dutch artist Paulus Potter(1625 – 1654) took to painting monumental pictures of farm animals, but no illustration can give you an idea of the scale of the work. ‘The Young Bull’ shows a life-size bull, and its realism is striking – there is an enormous cowpat more or less at eye level. This looks like a living animal, although in his book ‘The Upside Down World – Meetings with the Dutch Masters’, Benjamin Moser points out that the bull is actually a composite of several animals, drawn from memory. This doesn’t take away from the impression it made when it was first shown in the Louvre in 1795, after Napoleon had added the masterpieces of the Netherlands to his burgeoning collection of European art. The Dutch traveller Adriaan van der Willigen described its impact:
“I saw two French peasants taking a good long look at Potter’s large bull. Their natural and correct judgment pleased me particularly, and came down to their opinion that they thought this was the best painted and loveliest picture in the whole gallery. After they had spent a while this way, as if in bliss, they left the object not without regret”.(B.Moser, ‘The Upside Down World’ pg 247.
Clearly, Potter had a ‘thing’ about animals. He started off by painting images from mythology, as most artists did, but his humans paled into insignificance beside the animals. As a genre, there was no such thing as ‘animal painting’ in the Netherlands, so Potter invented it almost single-handedly. As he moved onto painting farmyard creatures, humans disappeared even more – I love the image of the milkmaid concealed behind the more important cow in the picture below.
Cattle with Milkmaid (1643) Paulus Potter
Although there are probably more paintings of cattle than any other animal, Potter could turn his hand to most mammals. I love the painting below, of two pigs below. You can see their individual characters, and also a kind of sadness, as if they knew what their ultimate end would be.
Two Pigs in a Sty (Paulus Potter, 1649)
And how about this splendid wolfhound? What has he seen in the mid-distance?
Wolfhound (Paulus Potter c. 1650-52)
And then there’s this piebald horse, looking somewhat anxiously off to the left. Does she sense a storm coming?
The Piebald Horse (Paulus Potter, c. 1650 -54)
Punishment of a Hunter by Paulus Potter (c. 1650 – 52)
Paulus Potter was one of a kind, an artist who didn’t shy away from the facts of life, and death. One of his paintings, known colloquially as ‘The Pissing Cow’ (brown standing cow on the left hand side if you want to see why) proved too much for its intended owner, who bundled it off to the vaults of the Hermitage instead.
The Farmyard aka The Pissing Cow by Paulus Potter, 1649
Potter died of tuberculosis in 1654. His life was short, but full of art – he created over a hundred paintings in his twenty-eight years, and his wife said that she never saw him without a notebook in his pocket, so that if he saw something unusual he could do a sketch on the spot. Some of these drawings have survived, and they’re full of energy and curiosity. They are all, without exception, of animals, and yet what shines through reminds us that we’re not the only species with emotions and personality. I am very glad to have discovered him, and will keep an eye open for his paintings when I visit European galleries – there is one at the National Gallery in the UK, for example. He is definitely in the same league as George Stubbs as far as I’m concerned, and he didn’t have a half-dissected horse in his garage.
Sketch of Pig and Piglet by Paulus Potter (c.1652)
A beautiful post to read before breakfast!