Attributed to Paulus Potter
The story
Attributed to Paulus Potter is the label museums use for a picture that experts believe is probably by Potter, the Dutch painter of cattle and meadows, without being able to prove it.
The caution has good reasons. Potter worked for only about ten years, so his genuine pictures are few, and from the 18th century on collectors paid high prices for them. Contemporaries such as the Amsterdam painter Albert Klomp painted the same quiet herds in a very similar manner, and some of their work later passed under Potter's name. Later hands also added his signature to pictures he never touched. The Dulwich Picture Gallery in London keeps examples with a forged Potter signature and date.
