The Four Bulls

The panel is signed in full and dated 1649, the year Paulus Potter appears in the register of the painters' guild in The Hague. Four animals share the pasture. A pale one lies in the middle of the foreground, a spotted one stands in front of a gnarled oak, a brown one turns its back, and a black and white one fills the left corner, with more cattle and a few buildings far behind.

In 1911 the Dutch scholar Cornelis Hofstede de Groot counted this picture among the small cattle pieces, with only a few animals each, that had won Potter more praise than his huge bull in The Hague. He also recorded a reversed version with cows instead of oxen, shown in New York in 1909 and judged an original by the author of that exhibition's catalogue. Hofstede de Groot called the animals oxen. The museum's title calls them bulls, and the Galleria Sabauda now lists the panel only as attributed to Potter.