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 [Illustration: _Fig. 24.--The Bull. By Paul Potter. B. 1._]