Berchem’s work is therefore false, and deserves to be called unimaginative. It convinces only the incompetent spectator of things.
Potter’s work is never false, and its imaginative quality is rather obscured than absent in his poorer productions. The fact is that, having
Fig. 27.—Mules. By K. Du Jardin. B. 2.
given the vital image of an animal, he could not resist the temptation of adding to it non-essential facts. He had not that transcendent intelligence which instinctively practises the economy called “style.” But it was on the side of intelligence, certainly not of tenderness or sympathy, that he was lacking. He sat down to Nature’s feast, and the delight of his eyes seduced him.
Before leaving this plate of the Two Plough Horses, we may notice a point which does not seem to have been remarked before, that there was apparently a kind of tradition of subjects among the animal painters and etchers. This plate was published, in the set of horses, in 1652. But in a set of etchings published the year before, 1651, by the artist Dirk Stoop, this identical subject appears. The horses stand towards the left of the plate in precisely the position of Potter’s horses.
Stoop, though as good as many of the Dutch etchers, was no consummate draughtsman, and his horses are not to be compared with Potter’s. Yet they do not look in the least like a copy, while the dates discountenance such a supposition. If there be any direct relation between the two etchings it must have been Potter who took a hint from Stoop. But it seems equally likely to suppose that the subject, two plough-horses released from labour, was a traditional one. The life of cattle and horses does not offer more than a certain number of typical pictures, and hence the tendency of painters and etchers to repeat the same subject, always with an eye to improving on the best yet done; just as earlier painters would choose a Saint Sebastian as the typical subject in which to display their power of painting the human figure. In the same way Potter’s fifth etching of horses, where he depicts the forlorn death that overcomes the worn-out beast, has its prototype in a similar etching by Pieter de Laer, and the subject is repeated by Du Jardin.
The etcher mentioned above, Dirk Stoop, Jed a wandering life, went to Lisbon, became painter to the Court there, and, being brought over to England with the Infanta, worked also in London. His etchings of horses and dogs are less good than those of the court fêtes, processions, and spectacles at Lisbon, at Hampton Court, and at London.
VI
If Potter did not produce many etchings himself, Marcus de Bye, who etched in most cases after Potter’s designs, was comparatively prolific. He produced over a hundred prints. Some of these,