Part 5

In Pieter de Laer this interest is still more frank. Born before 1613, de Laer found early a home in Italy, where his pictures were widely appreciated. In the same year that we have just mentioned, 1638, he, too, published a set of etchings of animals, in which attitude and action are caught with far more vivacity and truth than hitherto, while the design--though coarsely bitten--is light and free, compared with earlier work. Another set of horses, which probably followed this, is the prototype of studies like those of Potter’s.

De Laer seems to have been one of the first Dutchmen to import Dutch realism and the Dutch method of painting into Italy. The Italians found in such art something fresh and vigorous. De Laer soon gained immense vogue in the south, and had a corresponding influence on his countrymen who came to work there.

Among these, probably, was Claes Pietersz Berchem. It is not known for certain whether this artist visited Italy, but the internal evidence of his pictures points strongly to the supposition that he did. At any rate, Dr. Bredius is convinced of it, and for the present we may safely accept the hypothesis on his authority.

Berchem was born at Haarlem in 1620, but was working at Amsterdam before 1642, in which year his name occurs as member of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke. We also know that he was painted by Rembrandt in 1647.[12] Was this before or after his journey to Italy, asks Bredius, and leaves the question open. The etchings, however, help us towards an answer. 1644 is the date on a set of cattle, with a milkmaid for title; also on the _Return from the Fields_ (_L’Homme Monté sur l’Âne_) (B. 5). These are etched with fine, delicate short strokes, in a manner afterwards abandoned by Berchem. His most celebrated print, however, the so-called “Diamond,” or _Joueur de Cornemuse_ (B. 4), and the _Fluting Shepherd_ (B. 6), are in the delicate early manner, and must be assigned to the same date. Now, these are all unmistakably Italian in character. If we may assume from Berchem’s pictures that he had been to Italy, we can assume it with equal safety from these etchings. We may infer, then, that in 1647 he had already returned from Italy. Berchem had many pupils, including Karel du Jardin, of whom we shall speak later. He was evidently one of the popular artists of the day. It is curious to compare the features of the man as they live in

Rembrandt’s magnificent portrait,[13] with the characteristics of his art. It is a face in which, for all its obvious strength, there is a want of gentleness, fineness, impressibility; a type of nature that succeeds easier in life than in art: for the qualities which count for strength in the world count often in art for weakness. And weak, in truth, is Berchem the artist.

With his paintings we are not now concerned. Through them he rivalled Both in popularity, and for facility and complacency it is hard to say which bears the palm. Berchem is quite content to paint the gnarled trunk of an oak, the hairy leaf of a burdock, the moss on a stone and the stone itself, grass and leaping water, as of the same polished, one might almost say, “slimy” texture. So long as he has produced an agreeable composition, he is content.

In his etchings, this insensibility to the fine differences in the grain and moulding of things, all that goes to give trees and rocks and plants the charm and interest of character, is less obviously disclosed. At first sight the plates have a pleasant look, they are touched by a cunning hand which has attained no common skill in distributing light and in grouping. But one has not to look at them long before wearying of their emptiness. Berchem etches cows, and sheep, and goats, because they make pretty groups in composition--they add to the effect of a pastoral landscape; but in themselves he shows no real interest whatever. His goats pose; his cows have a look of faded human sentiment; his very sheep are foolishly self-conscious. Though they are drawn with a certain spirit and with a “touch” that mediocre artists and their admirers mistake for an evidence of genius, the main truths in the lines of these animal forms escape him.

In fine, Berchem was one of those men who have little of the artist in them but skill of hand and facility in assimilation. Having invented or concocted a recipe for producing a chosen class of subjects, he is perfectly happy in repeating himself as long as the demand continues. Berchem lived sixty-three years, and worked hard.

III

Who that has seen it can forget the portrait of Paul Potter by his friend Van der Helst? The most beautiful portrait of that accomplished painter, it has also an impalpable attraction that comes wholly from the sitter, and of the many choice pictures in that choice gallery of the Hague, the Mauritzhuis, its charm is not the least enduring.

The picture was painted in 1654, when Potter was already near death. A certain drooping of the eyelids, a pallor of the face, indicate the fatigue which was overmastering his powers. He was not yet thirty when he died, but his production had been immense. And in him, as sometimes happens, Nature, as if by a kind of anticipation, had brought the inborn gift to early flower, a compensation in some sort to the world for its early loss.

It was at Enkhuisen, a village on the extreme point of jutting land

that looks out upon the Zuider Zee, that Paul Potter was born, Nov. 20, 1625. But only his early boyhood was passed there, for in 1631 his father Pieter, also a painter, removed to Amsterdam. From his father the boy first learnt to draw, and perhaps from him also inherited the love of animals which was so strong in him. M. van Westrheene, in his life of Potter, conjectures that he was influenced by two artists, Aelbert Klomp and Govert Camphuisen, who painted pictures of the kind that Potter made famous. But these men appear to have begun painting too late for this to have been possible. Dr. Bredius thinks Claes Moeyart was a more likely source of influence. It is known also that at a certain period, about 1642, Potter was in the studio of Jacob de Wet at Haarlem. But whoever may have taught him, his early ripeness and the strong sincerity of his nature assure us that Potter derived little from any teacher. With vivid preferences, a habit of subtle observation, and an extraordinary skill of hand, he would have been content to repeat no master’s formulas, however popular. His first signed picture and his first signed etching bear the same date, 1643. He was eighteen years old. The etching (B. 14) shows already skill in grouping and a hitherto unknown knowledge in etching of animal forms. Its fault is over-much elaboration. Three years later Potter was at Delft, and there in 1647, at the age of twenty-two, painted his most famous picture, _The Young Bull_, now at the Hague. It was one of the pictures carried off by Napoleon, and of all those masterpieces from all countries which were restored by France in 1815, this was esteemed the second in value. Since then its fame has fallen, but with all its obvious demerits it has suffered more--to borrow an expression applied by Mr. Swinburne to Byron’s Address to Ocean in _Childe Harold_--from praise than from dispraise. In 1649 Potter removed to the Hague, and it was here that he met his wife, Adriana Balcheneynde, daughter of an architect in that town. They were married in the following year. His marriage did not stop the artist’s ceaseless industry, but rather increased it by his desire to provide for his household. Thinking perhaps to find more patrons there than at the Hague, he was induced by Dr. Tulp, the professor of anatomy, famous from Rembrandt’s picture, to come to Amsterdam. In a letter by a Frenchman who was in Amsterdam at this time, looking for pictures on behalf of Queen Christina of Sweden, we have a glimpse of Potter in his studio, working with prodigious assiduity. The Frenchman found Potter at work on a painting which had already cost him five months of continuous toil. “Rien ne se peut voir plus curieusement fait,” says the Frenchman. When we consider that the painter produced considerably over one hundred pictures in his brief life, it is amazing to realise his powers of work. He was only to live two years longer.

IV

The etched work of Potter that has come down to us consists of eighteen plates; not many, considering how prolific he was as a painter, but all the plates are important.

Taking them in chronological order, we have first the etching already spoken of, done when the artist was only eighteen, _The Cowherd_ (B. 14). In 1649, six years after its original execution, the plate was reduced in length by Potter and the new date affixed. A reedy hollow, with a pool, was substituted for the group of three cows at the left; and an alteration was also made in the feet of one of the cows descending the hill on the right. The etching, we know, was popular. For, after it had been cut down, it was issued by at least three publishers in turn; by F. de Wit, by P. Schenk, and by an anonymous publisher who effaced the two former names. Probably in the first instance it was issued by Potter himself, as was the series of cattle published in 1650.

Full of skill in grouping and knowledge of form as this plate is, it is certainly inferior to the later etchings. Already, by the next year, Potter was able to produce a print, _The Shepherd_ (B. 15) which surpasses it in every way, and which to more sound drawing adds a pastoral atmosphere of lightness and sunshine and repose.

Berchem, Potter’s senior by five years, was at Haarlem in 1642, when Potter, as we know, was in De Wet’s studio. We may assume, therefore, that the two met. Perhaps it was in emulation of Berchem’s set of etchings, published in 1644, that Potter produced his _Cowherd_ and _Shepherd_. If so, he succeeded in surpassing them.

There now occurs an interval of some years in Potter’s etched work. His next publication, so far as we know, was the series of eight plates (B. 1-8) representing cattle, and beginning with the fine _Bull_ (Fig. 24). This title-piece is dated 1650, so that we may refer the production of the plates to 1649, and possibly the year or two immediately preceding. However, the fact that 1649 is the date of the revised _Cowherd_ seems to point to Potter’s having resumed his interest in etching in that year, and to his having executed the whole set after the re-publication of that plate.

He would hardly issue an immature work, when he had by him much more triumphant specimens of his skill.

As studies of animals, these eight little plates are as good as they can be. But they are not more than studies. As we saw, it had become a fashion for artists to etch such studies, and so spread their fame among those who could not buy their pictures. This at once suggests the reason of Potter’s deficiency as an etcher. Strictly speaking, he was not an etcher at all. He used etching because it was the favourite medium for multiplying sketches of his time. But one feels that the burin would have been the apter instrument for that sure and cunning hand. There is a deliberation, a want of immediacy in these designs, that are not of the born etcher. Between the treatment of cattle in these etchings and their treatment in line-engraving by Lucas van Leyden there is no essential difference.

But we must take things as they are, and as specimens of subtle and certain drawing, the plates are astonishing. The attitudes and movements of oxen have never been better given. But it is not in mere correctness of drawing that Potter excels his rivals. Berchem was only interested in animals so far as they helped him in the composition of a landscape, but with Potter they were the main interest, he loved them for themselves. And in expressing that vague inarticulate soul that is in the look of cattle, that mildness and acquiescence which are in their attitudes and motions, he is a master, greater than any.

There is something in Dutch landscape, so open, tranquil, large, which seems to look for the presence of these peaceful creatures as its natural complement; their spirit is so entirely in harmony with the spirit of their pastures. Not accidental, perhaps, nor without its due effect, was the Dutch strain of blood in the American poet who seems to have first suggested in words what Potter expressed in art--

Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain, or halt in the leafy shade, What is it that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.[14]

Like Whitman, Potter is possessed by the fascination of animals; he, too, “stands and looks at them long and long.” And with a feeling so reticent that its intensity escapes a superficial notice, he puts into these etched lines the breath that moves their bodies, and the dumbness that looks out of their eyes.

V

Two years after the publication of the cattle series, appeared the five larger plates of horses. These have less the air of being mere etched studies for pictures; they seem to have been made for their own sake, and make a kind of history, such as Tolstoi in the strange story of Kohlstomir has written; a kind of Horse’s Progress.

The fourth (B. 12), the _Two Plough Horses_, is reproduced on Plate III. This and the _Horse Whinnying_ (B. 10) seem to the writer the finest of the series, and the finest of all Potter’s etchings. The work is entirely simple and unaffected: there is immense skill, but no apparent consciousness of it, still less parade of it. Nothing adventitious is brought in, no artifice is used of setting or surrounding: bathed in light and air, on their own level pastures, the horses stand clearly outlined. But what a feeling of morning freshness, of careless and free joy, is in the breeze that tosses the mane of the whinnying horse, and makes him tremble with felt vitality! It is a triumph of the untamed energy of life. How different a picture from this of the two tired creatures, set free from their heavy labour at the plough, but no longer rejoicing in their freedom, except as a respite. By some magic of sympathy Potter makes us feel the ache of their limbs, stiff with fatigue, just as he expresses the patience in their eyes. Yet tender as is the feeling of the drawing, it is so restrained that “pity” seems a word out of place. It is rather the simple articulation by means of sensitive portrayal, of an else inarticulate pathos. Such drawing as this is in a true sense imaginative.

The studies of dogs, reproduced in Fig. 25 are an admirable example of Potter’s gift. It is interesting to compare them with a drawing by Berchem, also in the British Museum, representing a hunting scene, with the boar at bay and dogs springing at him or struggling in the leash. Unfortunately, it has been impossible to find room for a reproduction of it; but whoever looks at it will perceive at once a vital difference between such drawing and that of Potter’s. Berchem sketches the scene in a rapid, summary manner, using a few strokes only for each figure. It is Rembrandt’s method; but what a difference in the result! There is a sketch by Rembrandt of a lion springing at and seizing a man on horseback. Only a few lines are used, but the whole action of each figure is expressed perfectly. Berchem thinks to do the like, but his

lines are all just beside the truth. His mind, which has not sufficient love for things to brood upon their forms, is incapable of the swift act of sympathy necessary to seize their movement in action; and its power of reproduction, by nature probably a delicate and precise faculty, has been warped and blunted by the man’s satisfaction in his own cleverness, till it gives an inaccurate image.

Berchem’s work is therefore false, and deserves to be called unimaginative. It convinces only the incompetent spectator of things.

Potter’s work is never false, and its imaginative quality is rather obscured than absent in his poorer productions. The fact is that, having

given the vital image of an animal, he could not resist the temptation of adding to it non-essential facts. He had not that transcendent intelligence which instinctively practises the economy called “style.” But it was on the side of intelligence, certainly not of tenderness or sympathy, that he was lacking. He sat down to Nature’s feast, and the delight of his eyes seduced him.

Before leaving this plate of the _Two Plough Horses_, we may notice a point which does not seem to have been remarked before, that there was apparently a kind of tradition of subjects among the animal painters and etchers. This plate was published, in the set of horses, in 1652. But in a set of etchings published the year before, 1651, by the artist Dirk Stoop, this identical subject appears. The horses stand towards the left of the plate in precisely the position of Potter’s horses.

Stoop, though as good as many of the Dutch etchers, was no consummate draughtsman, and his horses are not to be compared with Potter’s. Yet they do not look in the least like a copy, while the dates discountenance such a supposition. If there be any direct relation between the two etchings it must have been Potter who took a hint from Stoop. But it seems equally likely to suppose that the subject, two plough-horses released from labour, was a traditional one. The life of cattle and horses does not offer more than a certain number of typical pictures, and hence the tendency of painters and etchers to repeat the same subject, always with an eye to improving on the best yet done; just as earlier painters would choose a _Saint Sebastian_ as the typical subject in which to display their power of painting the human figure. In the same way Potter’s fifth etching of horses, where he depicts the forlorn death that overcomes the worn-out beast, has its prototype in a similar etching by Pieter de Laer, and the subject is repeated by Du Jardin.

The etcher mentioned above, Dirk Stoop, Jed a wandering life, went to Lisbon, became painter to the Court there, and, being brought over to England with the Infanta, worked also in London. His etchings of horses and dogs are less good than those of the court _fêtes_, processions, and spectacles at Lisbon, at Hampton Court, and at London.

VI

If Potter did not produce many etchings himself, Marcus de Bye, who etched in most cases after Potter’s designs, was comparatively prolific. He produced over a hundred prints. Some of these,

purporting to be after drawings by Potter, are studies, not of cattle and sheep or horses, but of wild animals--lions, tigers, and wolves. If these could be taken as fairly representative of Potter’s work, we should have to infer that Potter was far less fortunate in his drawing of wild creatures than of tame. And it would be unlike Potter to have made such studies except from the life. De Bye, however, lost a great deal of the subtlety and life of his original in working from Potter’s sketches. Karel du Jardin is a more independent artist. Born at Amsterdam in 1622, he was trained in Berchem’s studio, but went to Italy still young. There he found De Laer’s pictures in great esteem, and developed a manner and a choice of subject very similar to his. Some time before 1656 he returned to Holland, and remained at the Hague till 1659, when he removed to Amsterdam. There he painted some fine portraits, quite unlike his ordinary pictures in style, being stirred to emulation presumably by the superb Corporation pieces then produced there. In 1675 he started again for Italy, but died three years later in Venice.

The British Museum possesses a red-chalk drawing of Du Jardin by himself. It is an agreeable portrait, but the face does not suggest much power.

Though a pupil of Berchem, Du Jardin in his etchings follows Potter much more than that artist. Dr. Lippmann, in fact, speaks of him as “Schuler Potters,” but the expression must only mean a follower, not a pupil, of Potter.

Twenty-four of Du Jardin’s etchings are dated, the dates being 1652, 1653, 1655, 1656, 1658, 1659, 1660, and 1675. Only one piece belongs to the last year, while the other years have two, three, four, and five pieces each. So that, whenever the undated etchings were produced, the bulk of Du Jardin’s work on copper may safely be assigned to the eight years 1652-1660; that is to say, to the first years after his return to Holland, and possibly to the last year or two of his first stay in Italy. Most of the etchings are from sketches made in Italy. Fig. 27 is an example, and is a good specimen of Du Jardin as an etcher. There is nothing very original about such art, but its agreeable qualities will always give pleasure. Du Jardin, in his drawing and in his painting, has a light and happy touch; yet beyond such craftsman’s merits there is little to be said for him. He seems to have painted and etched what was the fashion with a facile grace and commendable skill, but without any strong inborn love of the subjects he handled.

As an etcher he is of the same order as Potter. A good many of the prints are pastoral landscapes; these are less good than those in which animals are the main subject. To turn from some of these small landscape

studies of Du Jardin’s, in which nothing is seized strongly while everything is made a little dull, to an etching of Rembrandt’s, say _Six’s Bridge_, is to receive a most vivid impression of Rembrandt’s immense superiority. Rembrandt’s light sketch is instinct with style; Du Jardin, in these prints at any rate, has no style at all. Such etchings as that of the pigs (Fig. 28) are of far higher quality.

Another etcher from Amsterdam, Adriaen van de Velde, came strongly under Potter’s influence. Born in 1635-36 Van de Velde, like Du Jardin, studied with Berchem. It has sometimes been assumed that he, too, followed up his studies with a journey to Italy, but Dr. Bredius decides against this supposition. There is Italian scenery in many of Adriaen’s pictures, but there were plenty of fellow artists to borrow materials for such backgrounds from. And with him the landscape is never much more than a background. His interest lay more in his cattle and his figures than in their surrounding. It is known, indeed, that he inserted figures for several of the landscape painters, including Ruisdael and Hobbema.

Van de Velde’s etchings are nearly all of cattle, and here he sometimes comes near Potter in drawing, while in management of the acid he is decidedly Potter’s superior. His earliest dated etching of 1653 is a large plate, which though not powerful has a real beauty. The cow which forms the centre of the composition is almost identical with that in the foreground of Potter’s _Cowherd_. Perhaps this was deliberate imitation, and if so, is evidence of the recognition Potter’s knowledge of animal form commanded, but it may equally well have been an accident. The whole plate is bathed in drowsy sunshine, with which the man asleep by the roadside, drawn with an admirable suggestion of repose, harmonises well. This print is one of those which must be seen in the silvery earliest state to be appreciated.