Paulus Potter

Sale, New York, Replica Shoes 's, 5 February 2025, lot 28

Though he died before his 29th birthday, Paulus Potter left an indelible mark on the history of Dutch art, through highly original paintings such as the famous Young Bull, in the Mauritshuis, The Hague. He also made 18 similarly creative prints, and a varied and accomplished group of drawings, though the latter are rather rare, and little studied. This large, grandly composed and highly worked drawing, previously unknown to scholars, is a major addition to the extremely small group of indisputably autograph drawings by the artist.

The only serious study of Potter’s drawings so far published is the account written by Ben Broos for the catalogue of the definitive 1994 Mauritshuis exhibition of the artist’s works in all media.¹ As Broos pointed out, there are some differences of opinion regarding the attribution of all except the handful of fully signed sheets, of which this is one. Direct connections between unsigned studies and paintings or etchings by the artist do, though, permit the definition of a corpus of generally accepted works, stretching to a few dozen sheets.

The earliest dated drawing by Potter that survives is the carefully finished Boar Hunt, executed in graphite on vellum, in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt (Inv. No. 893). Although proudly inscribed ‘Paulus Potter. f. out 14 jaer ao 1641’, the archival record of the artist’s birth seems to demonstrate that he was actually either 15 or 16, rather than 14, when he made the drawing, but it is still a prodigious achievement for such a young artist. The elaborate form of the signature is closely comparable with that found on the present drawing, executed when Potter had attained the relatively advanced age of 24.

The very detailed technique seen in this newly discovered drawing is something that corresponds, as Ben Broos has pointed out, with Potter’s painting technique: though he often worked on a much larger scale than his Lieden fijnschilder contemporaries, the meticulous handling in his paintings is in many respects comparable with what we see in works by artists such as Gerard Dou or Frans van Mieris. At the same time, and demonstrating his stylistic versatility, Potter also made very free studies from life of animals, individually and in small groups, surely sheets from a dismantled sketchbook or sketchbooks. These drawings, which include examples in the Abrams Collection, the Lugt Collection and the British Museum, were used and adapted by Potter as the basis for many motifs in his paintings.²

The other main type of drawing that we know from his hand consists of studies directly relating to his etchings – chalk drawings that fall, in terms of degree of finish, somewhere in between the animal sketches and the elaborate signed drawings.

The small group of ambitious, highly finished, signed drawings, to which this is such an important addition, seem to fall into two categories: those made as independent works of art in their own right, and drawings that were clearly made as ricordi or slight variants of paintings, presumably so that what Potter considered a successful and appealing composition would not be lost when the painting left his studio on its way to its patron or purchaser’s house. It is perhaps worth mentioning that this system of recording compositions of paintings was not unique to Potter’s working practice: it was extremely common in Italy, and a prime example in the Netherlands is the studio practice of the De Bray family, as has been described by Jeroen Giltaij and Friso Lammertse.³

Perhaps the most comparable to the present drawing among the previously published works by Potter is the Herdsmen with their livestock, in the British Museum.⁴ Less than half the size of the newly discovered Landscape with Herders and their Animals at Rest (215 x 344mm, as opposed to 426 x 530mm), but no less carefully worked, the British Museum drawing relates to the compositions of two paintings: in this case the 1648 Shepherds with their flock, in the Wallace Collection (Inv. No. P 189) and Cattle near a sheep-byre, 1649, in the City Art Gallery, Manchester (inv. No. 1979: 443).

Revealingly for its function, the London drawing is dated 1650, slightly later then the related paintings, and Broos proposes that the artist would have made it as an independent work for sale, loosely based on the paintings. Whether or not Potter did indeed make the drawing for this reason, rather than as a record of his composition, the chronological relationship between drawing and related painting is exactly the same in the case of the present work, which is very close indeed in composition to the signed and dated painting of 1648, known as The Milkmaid, in Schwerin (fig. 1).⁵

Interestingly, the painting is in fact slight smaller than the drawing (it measures 380 x 495mm), but otherwise, apart from the fact that the signature is differently located (and includes a different date), the two correspond very closely. They share the same disposition of figures and animals, and in both the depiction of the humorous subject is identical: the young milkmaid playfully squirts milk into the face of the young swain while the older herder, the dog, and even the horse, look away, unmoved by the romantic scene being played out under their noses.

Stylistic evolution is a concept of limited relevance when considering an artist whose mature career spanned only a decade or so, but it does seem that Potter’s later compositions tend to be increasingly complex, and also more anecdotal, more frequently including the type of narrative, genre elements that we see here. The influence of Pieter van Laer seems to have been particularly relevant in these works, and perhaps even in the somewhat caricatural facial types.

The extreme rarity of Potter’s drawings is highlighted by the fact that only one significant example has appeared at auction in the past quarter century: the fine, but much smaller, drawing of Herdsmen and Animals Sheltering from a Storm, sold from the Van Regteren Altena Collection in 2014, and now in the Clement C. Moore Collection, New York (Promised Gift to the Morgan Library and Museum).⁶ The discovery of a major, large-scale, signed and dated sheet, grandly conceived, in excellent condition, and revealing of a fascinating aspect of Potter’s working method, is therefore an event of considerable significance in our developing understanding of the style, technique and function of the drawings of this familiar yet still understudied master of the Dutch Golden Age.

1.Ben Broos, ‘Paulus Potter as draughtsman and etcher’, in Amy Walsh, Edwin Buijsen and Ben Broos, Paulus Potter, Paintings, drawings and etchings, exhib. cat., The Hague, Mauritshuis, 1994-95, pp. 38-53, 158-183, cat. nos. 32-44

2.Exhib. cat., op. cit., pp. 46, 182-3, cat. 44

3.J. Giltaij and F. Lammertse, ‘Maintaining a studio archive: drawn copies by the De Braij family,’ Master Drawings, vol 39 (2001), pp. 367-394

4.London, The British Museum, Inv. No. 1910,0212.169; Exhib. cat., op. cit., no. 38

5.Staatliches Museum Schwerin, inv. nr 144; exhib. cat., op. cit., p. 33, fig. 24

6.Sale, London, Christie’s, 10 July 2014, lot 54; see Far & Away. Drawings from the Clement C. Moore Collection, exhib. cat., New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, 2024, cat. 58