Series of various oxen and cows ('Het Bullenboekje'). Plate 2. A cow standing and another lying down.

When Paulus Potter (1625-54) died of tuberculosis before he was 30 years old, he had already profoundly influenced the way animals are depicted in European art. Potter created portraits of animals, making them his picture's focus, not just a backdrop for human action. The precocious son of a painter, his first dated work is from 1640. He entered Delft's Guild of Saint Luke in 1646, and later moved to The Hague. He is said to have wandered the Dutch countryside, sketchbook in hand, equally sensitive to how farm animals behave at different times of day and to light's vicissitudes from morning to dusk. Few of his contemporaries were more attuned to nature's moods or to the timeless harmony of beast, landscape, and weather. Potter's strong feeling for composition is seen in the way he grouped forms and used silhouette. Besides his paintings, he produced some two dozen etchings of animal subjects. After his death, Marcus de Bye made many more etchings after Potter's designs, and these are well represented in Te Papa's collection.

This etching depicts a cow standing in a paddock and another, seen from behind, lying down. The foreground cow is not so much a picture of an animal as a portrait, viewed from close up and with obvious sympathy on the artist's part. It is Plate 2 of the Series of various oxen and cows (Het Bullenboekje) (Hollstein), first published by Frederick de Wit in Amsterdam, 1650. There are eight prints in the set, and of these Te Papa currently has plates 2, 4, 5 and 7. All of them were presented to the Colonial Museum by Bishop Ditlev Monrad in 1869.

See: J. Paul Getty Museum, 'Paulus Potter', http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/259/paulus-potter-dutch-1625-1654/

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   April 2019