Chapter III

Who that has seen it can forget the portrait of Paul Potter by his friend Van der Helst? The most beautiful portrait of that accomplished painter, it has also an impalpable attraction that comes wholly from the sitter, and of the many choice pictures in that choice gallery of the Hague, the Mauritzhuis, its charm is not the least enduring.

The picture was painted in 1654, when Potter was already near death. A certain drooping of the eyelids, a pallor of the face, indicate the fatigue which was overmastering his powers. He was not yet thirty when he died, but his production had been immense. And in him, as sometimes happens, Nature, as if by a kind of anticipation, had brought the inborn gift to early flower, a compensation in some sort to the world for its early loss.

It was at Enkhuisen, a village on the extreme point of jutting land

that looks out upon the Zuider Zee, that Paul Potter was born, Nov. 20, 1625. But only his early boyhood was passed there, for in 1631 his father Pieter, also a painter, removed to Amsterdam. From his father the boy first learnt to draw, and perhaps from him also inherited the love of animals which was so strong in him. M. van Westrheene, in his life of Potter, conjectures that he was influenced by two artists, Aelbert Klomp and Govert Camphuisen, who painted pictures of the kind that Potter made famous. But these men appear to have begun painting too late for this to have been possible. Dr. Bredius thinks Claes Moeyart was a more likely source of influence. It is known also that at a certain period, about 1642, Potter was in the studio of Jacob de Wet at Haarlem. But whoever may have taught him, his early ripeness and the strong sincerity of his nature assure us that Potter derived little from any teacher. With vivid preferences, a habit of subtle observation, and an extraordinary skill of hand, he would have been content to repeat no master’s formulas, however popular. His first signed picture and his first signed etching bear the same date, 1643. He was eighteen years old. The etching (B. 14) shows already skill in grouping and a hitherto unknown knowledge in etching of animal forms. Its fault is over-much elaboration. Three years later Potter was at Delft, and there in 1647, at the age of twenty-two, painted his most famous picture, _The Young Bull_, now at the Hague. It was one of the pictures carried off by Napoleon, and of all those masterpieces from all countries which were restored by France in 1815, this was esteemed the second in value. Since then its fame has fallen, but with all its obvious demerits it has suffered more--to borrow an expression applied by Mr. Swinburne to Byron’s Address to Ocean in _Childe Harold_--from praise than from dispraise. In 1649 Potter removed to the Hague, and it was here that he met his wife, Adriana Balcheneynde, daughter of an architect in that town. They were married in the following year. His marriage did not stop the artist’s ceaseless industry, but rather increased it by his desire to provide for his household. Thinking perhaps to find more patrons there than at the Hague, he was induced by Dr. Tulp, the professor of anatomy, famous from Rembrandt’s picture, to come to Amsterdam. In a letter by a Frenchman who was in Amsterdam at this time, looking for pictures on behalf of Queen Christina of Sweden, we have a glimpse of Potter in his studio, working with prodigious assiduity. The Frenchman found Potter at work on a painting which had already cost him five months of continuous toil. “Rien ne se peut voir plus curieusement fait,” says the Frenchman. When we consider that the painter produced considerably over one hundred pictures in his brief life, it is amazing to realise his powers of work. He was only to live two years longer.