Three Cows on a Pasture

This small picture is dated 1646, the year Paulus Potter, just 20, was admitted to the painters' guild in Delft and could finally sell work under his own name. Most painters starting out chased portraits or grand religious scenes, the commissions that paid. Potter built his career instead on farm animals in the flat Dutch countryside. Here three cows rest in an open pasture under a wide, low sky, the kind of unremarkable field a traveller would pass without a glance. He gives it the steady, unhurried attention other painters reserved for saints and princes. Cattle like these stayed the whole subject of a career that lasted barely a decade before tuberculosis ended it in 1654.