Page:Hofstede de Groot catalogue raisonné, Volume 4, 1912.djvu/598

 SECT. 584 PAULUS POTTER vegetables, a Van der Heyde every joining in the plaster on his buildings, a Potter every blade of grass in his foregrounds, without letting the work become small in treatment or restless. The observer may recognise this sign of greatness in them most easily when he compares the work of these masters with that of their imitators. Although Potter is much more of a draughtsman than a painter, he lacks sufficient anatomical knowledge to draw his animals with unfailing accuracv. He is at his best when he has allowed the cattle or horses to pose before him in restful content ; he has not always grasped their move- ments correctly. The fact that in his time the breeds of horses and cattle in Holland were very different from what they are now, increases the feeling of surprise which his animals often arouse in us. Potter has not won the highest praise by his colossal pictures such as "The Bull" at The Hague (48), the "Bear-Hunt" at the Rijksmuseum (160), or the equestrian portrait in the Six collection (10), but rather by a number of cattle-pieces with a few cows, such as are preserved in the galleries at Paris (52), Turin (42), Kassel (39, 47), and Schwerin (54), and in private collections such as that of Jonkheer Steengracht (26) and that of the Earl of Ellesmere at Bridgewater House (27), and also by two rich compositions of farmyards which have long been celebrated, namely, the picture in the collection of the Duke of Westminster at Grosvenor House, London (94), and that with the cow making water at the Hermitage, St. Petersburg (114). In these masterpieces the representa- tion of animal life is combined with a fulness of subject-matter and with an excellent rendering of sunlight. Excellent, too, is the suggestion of morning light in a little piece in the Czernin collection (106). Remark- ably true to nature, also, is the life-size " Wolfhound " outside his kennel at the Hermitage, St. Petersburg (132). In the case of a painter who only lived to be twenty-eight, it is very difficult to trace out an artistic development. Potter's youthful works, painted up to his twenty- first year (1646), may be distinguished by a certain clumsiness in drawing and composition. They are strongly influ- enced by his father and by his second teacher Moeyaert. In the " Abra- ham setting out for Canaan " there seem to be obvious signs of collaboration between the father and the son, for the figures may be ascribed to Pieter and the animals to Paulus. Soon after 1646 Potter attained his artistic zenith. The masterpieces just named in the collections of Count Gzernin and the Duke of Westminster are dated 1647; "The Bull" at The Hague dates from the same year, and " The Great Farm " at the Hermitage from 1649. In his later years Potter's style becomes somewhat softer and shows a transition from the manner of a draughtsman to that of a painter. To the year 1652 belong several remarkable works, while in 1653 the disease which preyed upon him naturally had an enervating influence on his art. Yet his equestrian portrait of Tulp is just as astonishing a pro- duction for a man who was to die a few months later from consumption as " The Bull " was for a youth of twenty-one. Potter was exceptionally industrious. His work in painting is, com- paratively speaking, as extensive as that of the most prolific among other painters. Houbraken, who derived his information from the descendants