Artwork · 17th century · Paulus Potter

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Two Cows and a Young Bull beside a Fence in a Meadow

Paulus Potter1647Oil on panel49.5 × 37.2 cm

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At a glance

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Three cattle rest by a wooden fence under a big, cloudy Dutch sky: one stands, one stares at us, one lies in the dirt.
Paulus Potter painted it in oil on a wooden panel in 1647, when he was about twenty-one.
Potter gives each animal its own pose, coat and face, the way other painters treated people in portraits.

Reading the picture

5 places to look closer

Tap a number on the painting to jump to its note, or a close-up to see that spot in the whole picture.

Start with the dark animal in the middle. Its glossy eyes look straight out of the picture. The mouth hangs a little open, and you can see the lower teeth. A tuft of pale, curly hair sits on its brow. For a moment it feels as if the cow is studying us.
Now look at the white head of the animal lying in front. Potter curls the hair on its forehead with tiny strokes, one twist at a time. A horn bends around behind a soft, upright ear, and a reddish-brown patch begins at the neck. The Art Institute of Chicago says his attention to coats like this comes close to portraiture.
Peek past the big cow's legs on the far left. A distant meadow opens up, with two black cows lying in the grass. Beyond them are more cattle, a pair of pointed roofs and a soft wall of trees. Everything in front is huge, so everything back there shrinks to the size of a fingernail.
Climb to the top of the bare tree on the right. A small bird perches on the thinnest twig, tail hanging down. Two more birds fly through the sky to the left. Among these heavy animals, Potter tucks in a few light, quick lives.
Look at the wooden fence beside the tree. Written in dark paint on a rail are the words Paulus Potter and the number 1647. This is the fence from the title. The painter set his signature on an object inside the scene, as if he had carved it there.

When it was painted

In 1647 Paulus Potter was a young painter just starting out on his own. He was born in 1625 in Enkhuizen, the son of a painter. The year before this picture, in 1646, he joined the painters' guild in Delft.

That same year he painted The Young Bull, now in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. It shows a single young bull at close to life size, a huge canvas for an animal. This panel is far smaller. The Art Institute of Chicago thinks its animals likely came from drawings Potter made from real cattle.

In 1649 he moved to The Hague, and in 1650 he married there. The early biographer Arnold Houbraken wrote that the Amsterdam physician Nicolaes Tulp persuaded him to come to Amsterdam, and Potter moved there in 1652. Less than two years later, in January 1654, he was buried in Amsterdam. He was twenty-eight.

The painter's life was short, but this picture traveled. It appears in a modern study of the collection of Gerrit Braamcamp, an eighteenth-century Amsterdam collector. It shows up again in research on the early nineteenth-century collection of Lucretia Johanna van Winter, also in Amsterdam. By 1824 it was listed in a book about paintings brought into England, and in 1997 it entered the Art Institute of Chicago.

Go back to the fence and find that small dark 1647. Next to it, three animals are still resting through the same cloudy afternoon a very young painter gave them.

The painter

Paulus Potter

1625–1654

When painting this, the artist was about 22 years old

All paintings by Paulus Potter →

Two Cows and a Young Bull beside a Fence in a Meadow

Questions to think about

Look for itWhich of the three animals is looking straight at you, and which one seems to be looking somewhere else?
Why?Why do you think Potter made this picture tall and narrow, and gave almost half of it to the sky?
What about you?Potter painted cows as individuals, each with its own face. Do we see the animals that feed and clothe us that way today?

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