W. J. Taylor after Paul Potter. The Shooting Ponies

Paul (Paulus) Potter (1625-1654) was a Dutch contemporary of Cuyp, Ruisdael, and Hobbema, but he died when he was only twenty-nine years old. He was born along the northern coastline in the fishing and shipping port of Enkhuizen. He trained as a painter primarily with his father, and had a very successful early career in Delft and the Hague before moving to Amsterdam in 1652. His death was by consumption exacerbated by overwork. In his relatively short time on earth he completed more than one hundred paintings and thirty etchings. The one surviving portrait of Potter was painted by Bartholemeus van der Helst just before the young painter’s death in 1654. That portrait begins the essay on “Paul Potter” in the 1854 edition of The Works of Eminent Masters that Melville acquired in 1871 (1: 401; fig. 1 below). 

Melville’s copy of Potter’s The Shooting Ponies was engraved by W. J. Taylor for The Royal Gallery of Pictures in 1839. This was one of the first prints after Potter to be published in England. In Melville’s copy of The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland that Frank Cundall published in 1891, Taylor’s engraving of The Shooting Ponies was still “one of the few English engravings after [Potter’s] work” (p. 138).

Potter’s original painting, now known as Two Sportsmen Outside an Inn, was completed in 1651, acquired by King George IV in 1811, and was at Buckingham Palace from the time the engraving was made until being moved to Windsor Castle in 1972 (White, no. 156, p. 100, pl. 125). The painting itself (fig. 2) is more brightly colored than one might expect from the engraving. The commentary that accompanies the engraving in 1839 praises its "brilliancy of execution: . . . Highly finished in a strong body of colour, its deep full glow indicates the heat of the day” (29).

This painting comes from the period in Potter’s short life which he transitioned from relatively static depictions of animals to a more interactive and anecdotal style. In the words of the 1839 commentator: "Two horsemen halt before a road-side public house. The hostler fastens the stirrup of one of the cavaliers. An old man, sitting on a bench, is wiping the perspiration from his bald head." Inside the doorway, "the pig and woman seem on perfect terms of companionship." The dogs before the horse in the foreground on the right are quite companionable too, the one sniffing the other as the horse casually relieves himself.

The word “hostler” in the above description, combined with a “road-side public house,” makes clear that those mounted horsemen are at the kind of roadside inn that the Dutch called a “hostelry” because it housed horses as well as men. The Dutch sportsmen in Potter's 1650s painting, no less than the Dutch Old Masters in Melville's unfinished 1890s poem, are “At the Hostelry.” As Jan Steen declares in that poem, “All’s picturesque beneath the sun” (NN BBO 162).  

Melville had relatively few opportunities to see paintings by Paul Potter face to face. In London in 1849 he does not appear to have visited Buckingham Palace, which had other Potters besides the one Taylor engraved. The appendixes in the copy of Hazlitt’s 1843 edition of Criticisms of Art that Melville acquired in 1871 listed no Potters in most of the galleries Melville did visit in London in 1849 (none among the 1008 paintings at Hampton Court, none among the 208 paintings at Windsor Castle, none among the 182 paintings at the National Gallery, and none among the 72 paintings at Samuel Rogers's private gallery). There were, however, five paintings attributed to Paul Potter when Melville visited the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Cundall in 1891 does not include any of those as authentic paintings by Potter himself, but the Dulwich website today does consider Cattle and Sheep to be an authentic copy of a Potter painting from after 1650 (see fig. 3).  

The one authentic painting by Potter that Melville is certain to have seen face to face was the famous Bear Hunt on display at the Trippenhuis (now known as the Rijksmuseum) during his visit to Amsterdam in April 1857. We know he saw this painting (fig. 4) because he wrote in his April 14 journal entry: “Wonderful picture of Potter—The Bear” (NN J 126-27, 523). 

For a long time, the Bear Hunt was one of Potter’s most popular paintings because of its dramatic subject, its life-size figures, and its absolute size (6’ 8” x 10’ 10"). But even by the time Melville saw it in Amsterdam in 1857, serious reservations were being expressed. The copy he acquired of The Works of Eminent Masters, published in 1854, declared that the young painter had made “a very great error” when he “endeavoured to enlarge his tone, to increase his proportions, and elevate his charming pastorals to the dignity of historic pages” (1: 405). One additional problem with the Bear Hunt is that Potter had never actually seen a scene such as the one he depicted.  

By 1891, when Cundall published the chapter on Potter in Melville’s copy of The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland, experts had even less patience for Potter’s “attempts to treat animals with whose forms and characters he could not be familiar.” This was particularly evident in the Bear Hunt, whose central action was by then being dismissed as “hideous, hard, dry, wooden, without truth, and of ridiculous action” (122, 128). The most conspicuous example for me is the depiction of the dog chasing a bear up the trunk of the tree.