Potter, PAUL, the greatest animal-painter of the Dutch school, was born at Enkhmizen in 1625, and was the pupil of his father, Pieter Potter, a landscape-painter, with whom in 1631 he came to Amsterdam. He was also an excellent etcher, and so precocious that his best etched pieces, 'The Herdsman' and 'The Shepherd,' were finished in 1643 and 1644 respectively. He established himself at the Hague in 1649, where next year he married the daughter of an architect, but in 1653 he returned to Amsterdam. He died there in January 1654 at the untimely age of twenty-nine. His best pictures are pastoral scenes with animal figures, the life-size 'Young Bull' (1647, at the Hague) being especially celebrated. His 'Dairy Farm,' measuring only by inches, was sold in London on 27th June 1890 from the Stover collection for £6090, or £13 per square inch. The Rijks Museum at Amsterdam possesses the 'Bear-hunt' and seven other pictures from his easel. Very many of his productions are preserved in England.
See P. Potter, sa Vie et ses Œuvres, by Van Westreene (the Hague, 1867), and Cundall, Landscape Painters of Holland ('Great Artists' series, 1891).