The son of an obscure painter, Potter was born at Enkhuizen in 1625. From 1646 to 1648 he resided at Delft, where his masterpiece, _The Young Bull_ of the Hague Gallery, was painted. In 1649 he moved to The Hague and married the daughter of an architect, Adriana Balckeneijnde. In 1652 he moved to Amsterdam and continued to reside there until his death in 1654. _The Young Bull_ is an amazing achievement of self-discipline and almost passionate pursuit of truth. It suggests the attitude of the painter to have been that once and for all he would master the creature’s appearance. He set himself a great task of prolonged endurance and has carried it through to an extraordinary realization. The character of the beast, as it shows itself to the eye; the incidents of its form and carriage; the glossy pelt with its actual surface of hair, the brilliant eye, the damp nozzle--every detail is of life. Having completed this study, which established for himself the knowledge and skill he had sought and became a model for the instruction of other artists, he filled in the rest of the canvas in a somewhat perfunctory manner. The sky has good quality, but remains a background in the rear of the composition; the intermediate landscape, overspread effectively with a pale light, does not maintain its proper plane. The beasts in the foreground are as hard as wood, the details of the tree niggling, and the figure of the man ill drawn and tamely comprehended. In fact, it is not as a picture that the canvas is remarkable, but for its consummately realistic treatment of the one overpowering detail. Other large canvases, also products of the artist’s extreme youth, are the _Bear Hunt_ of the Rijks Museum and the _Boar Hunt_ in the Carstanjen Collection of the Berlin Gallery. They are open to the same general criticism, without the wonderful exception. They are evidences of a young man’s exuberant indiscretion, though he was probably induced to it by the high value that clients set upon such pictures. Meanwhile, as early as 1646, that is to say, when he was twenty-one, he was settling down to the smaller pictures, artistically felt and rendered, that mark the end of his career. One of the earliest of these, dated 1648, is the scene of _Cattle and Bathers_, in the Hague Gallery; finely composed and full of happy observation of country life, but somewhat hard in texture. Yet the previous year had produced the _Horses at the Door of a Cottage_ of the Louvre, where the scene is enveloped in the soft half-light of a glowing evening sky. Another beautiful evening scene is _Landscape with Cattle_ of the National Gallery. PHILIPS WOUWERMAN