Two Cows and a Young Bull beside a Fence in a Meadow

Paulus Potter, a prolific painter and etcher during his short life, elevated images of cows, oxen, and other domestic animals to majestic emblems of nature. His lavish attention to the physical appearances of such beasts—the varied texture and coloring of their hair, their characteristic poses, their bulky contours—borders on portraiture and likely derived from drawings he made from life. With Potter, animal painting blossomed into an independent genre in the Dutch Republic.