Koeien ontmoeten: De kunst van het kijken naar koeien

Paulus Potter was an animal painter, a profession that didn’t exist before he made it one. As the son of a painter, he trained at a young age in depicting mainly cows, sometimes a horse or a sheep. He would occasionally include a human in his paintings, but they never really had an engaging face. The animals, on the other hand, seem to look straight at us. According to tradition, Potter’s wife complained that he was away so often. He would walk from their house in the center of The Hague to the countryside, to see his beloved cows. There he spent hours sketching, which he later developed in his studio. His by far largest painting is The Young Bull, 1647, now in the Mauritshuis. It is a life-sized depiction of a standing young bull with a lying cow beside it, some sheep, and a farmer. A skylark hangs in the sky, and flies circle around a cow pat. A mysterious work – it is unclear whether it was a commission and who had paid for the depiction of an animal on a scale reserved for important historical figures.