THE YOUNG BULL PAUL POTTER
HAGUE MUSEUM
The son of an obscure painter, Potter was born at Enkhuizen in 1625. From 1646 to 1648 he resided at Delft, where his masterpiece, The Young Bull of the Hague Gallery, was painted. In 1649 he moved to The Hague and married the daughter of an architect, Adriana Balckeneijnde. In 1652 he moved to Amsterdam and continued to reside there until his death in 1654.
The Young Bull is an amazing achievement of self-discipline and almost passionate pursuit of truth. It suggests the attitude of the painter to have been that once and for all he would master the creature’s appearance. He set himself a great task of prolonged endurance and has carried it through to an extraordinary realization. The character of the beast, as it shows itself to the eye; the incidents of its form and carriage; the glossy pelt with its actual surface of hair, the brilliant eye, the damp nozzle—every detail is of life. Having completed this study, which established for himself the knowledge and skill he had sought and became a model for the instruction of other artists, he filled in the rest of the canvas in a somewhat perfunctory manner. The sky has good quality, but remains a background in the rear of the composition; the intermediate landscape, overspread effectively with a pale light, does not maintain its proper plane. The beasts in the foreground are as hard as wood, the details of the tree niggling, and the figure of the man ill drawn and tamely comprehended. In fact, it is not as a picture that the canvas is remarkable, but for its consummately realistic treatment of the one overpowering detail.
Other large canvases, also products of the artist’s extreme youth, are the Bear Hunt of the Rijks Museum and the Boar Hunt in the Carstanjen Collection of the Berlin Gallery. They are open to the same general criticism, without the wonderful exception. They are evidences of a young man’s exuberant indiscretion, though he was probably induced to it by the high value that clients set upon such pictures. Meanwhile, as early as 1646, that is to say, when he was twenty-one, he was settling down to the smaller pictures, artistically felt and rendered, that mark the end of his career. One of the earliest of these, dated 1648, is the scene of Cattle and Bathers, in the Hague Gallery; finely composed and full of happy observation of country life, but somewhat hard in texture. Yet the previous year had produced the Horses at the Door of a Cottage of the Louvre, where the scene is enveloped in the soft half-light of a glowing evening sky. Another beautiful evening scene is Landscape with Cattle of the National Gallery.
PHILIPS WOUWERMAN
This charmingly original and versatile artist, whose works abound in public and private collections, was born in Haarlem in 1619 and died there in 1668. He studied landscape with Jan Wynants, but the teacher who set the tenor of his career was Frans Hals. It was from the latter that he derived his skill in handling figures, composing them in groups, placing them in space, and rendering them with fluency and vitality of brushwork; and the principles thus acquired were applied by him also to the treatment of the landscape. On his own part he brought to his work a singularly alert observation, that was happy in hitting upon the fugitive and accidental aspects of a scene, and a fancy that invests his subject with a lyrical grace.
His fecundity was such that it is estimated he left some seven hundred examples, which may be divided into those of his early period, which extended through the forties, and those of his maturity, which belong to the fifties and early sixties. He was brought up during the vicissitudes of the Thirty Years’ War, and the impressions of soldiering suggested many of his subjects of cavalry, skirmishing, on the march, or halting at an inn. Elsewhere it is hunting parties, riding parties, gay cavalcades of ladies and gentlemen; then, again, scenes of farming life: the bringing home of hay, watering of horses, scenes in the smithy—an inexhaustible array of incidents in which figure men and women and their friends, the horse and dog. With such unusual productivity it is not strange that some of his pictures suffered by haste of execution. This is especially true of his latest pictures, where the shadows have come through and destroyed the brilliance of the colors. For, though Wouwerman was not a colorist, he was an adept at suggesting the gaiety of color, and his best pictures are bouquets of animated brilliance.