Le Taureau

Paulus Potter signed this life-size bull in 1647, when he was 22 years old. Painting an ordinary farm animal at the scale usually reserved for kings and saints came close to a provocation, and the sheer size let him pile in detail, down to the flies on the animal's hide and the dung on the ground. Some admired it, some found it vulgar. Its fame carried it a long way. When French troops looted Dutch collections in the 1790s, they hauled this bull to Paris, where for 20 years it hung in the Louvre among the Raphaels and Titians that Napoleon had seized from Italy. Potter himself did not last. He died in 1654, not yet 30.