Chapter V

Two years after the publication of the cattle series, appeared the five larger plates of horses. These have less the air of being mere etched studies for pictures; they seem to have been made for their own sake, and make a kind of history, such as Tolstoi in the strange story of Kohlstomir has written; a kind of Horse’s Progress.

The fourth (B. 12), the _Two Plough Horses_, is reproduced on Plate III. This and the _Horse Whinnying_ (B. 10) seem to the writer the finest of the series, and the finest of all Potter’s etchings. The work is entirely simple and unaffected: there is immense skill, but no apparent consciousness of it, still less parade of it. Nothing adventitious is brought in, no artifice is used of setting or surrounding: bathed in light and air, on their own level pastures, the horses stand clearly outlined. But what a feeling of morning freshness, of careless and free joy, is in the breeze that tosses the mane of the whinnying horse, and makes him tremble with felt vitality! It is a triumph of the untamed energy of life. How different a picture from this of the two tired creatures, set free from their heavy labour at the plough, but no longer rejoicing in their freedom, except as a respite. By some magic of sympathy Potter makes us feel the ache of their limbs, stiff with fatigue, just as he expresses the patience in their eyes. Yet tender as is the feeling of the drawing, it is so restrained that “pity” seems a word out of place. It is rather the simple articulation by means of sensitive portrayal, of an else inarticulate pathos. Such drawing as this is in a true sense imaginative.

The studies of dogs, reproduced in Fig. 25 are an admirable example of Potter’s gift. It is interesting to compare them with a drawing by Berchem, also in the British Museum, representing a hunting scene, with the boar at bay and dogs springing at him or struggling in the leash. Unfortunately, it has been impossible to find room for a reproduction of it; but whoever looks at it will perceive at once a vital difference between such drawing and that of Potter’s. Berchem sketches the scene in a rapid, summary manner, using a few strokes only for each figure. It is Rembrandt’s method; but what a difference in the result! There is a sketch by Rembrandt of a lion springing at and seizing a man on horseback. Only a few lines are used, but the whole action of each figure is expressed perfectly. Berchem thinks to do the like, but his

lines are all just beside the truth. His mind, which has not sufficient love for things to brood upon their forms, is incapable of the swift act of sympathy necessary to seize their movement in action; and its power of reproduction, by nature probably a delicate and precise faculty, has been warped and blunted by the man’s satisfaction in his own cleverness, till it gives an inaccurate image.

Berchem’s work is therefore false, and deserves to be called unimaginative. It convinces only the incompetent spectator of things.

Potter’s work is never false, and its imaginative quality is rather obscured than absent in his poorer productions. The fact is that, having

given the vital image of an animal, he could not resist the temptation of adding to it non-essential facts. He had not that transcendent intelligence which instinctively practises the economy called “style.” But it was on the side of intelligence, certainly not of tenderness or sympathy, that he was lacking. He sat down to Nature’s feast, and the delight of his eyes seduced him.

Before leaving this plate of the _Two Plough Horses_, we may notice a point which does not seem to have been remarked before, that there was apparently a kind of tradition of subjects among the animal painters and etchers. This plate was published, in the set of horses, in 1652. But in a set of etchings published the year before, 1651, by the artist Dirk Stoop, this identical subject appears. The horses stand towards the left of the plate in precisely the position of Potter’s horses.

Stoop, though as good as many of the Dutch etchers, was no consummate draughtsman, and his horses are not to be compared with Potter’s. Yet they do not look in the least like a copy, while the dates discountenance such a supposition. If there be any direct relation between the two etchings it must have been Potter who took a hint from Stoop. But it seems equally likely to suppose that the subject, two plough-horses released from labour, was a traditional one. The life of cattle and horses does not offer more than a certain number of typical pictures, and hence the tendency of painters and etchers to repeat the same subject, always with an eye to improving on the best yet done; just as earlier painters would choose a _Saint Sebastian_ as the typical subject in which to display their power of painting the human figure. In the same way Potter’s fifth etching of horses, where he depicts the forlorn death that overcomes the worn-out beast, has its prototype in a similar etching by Pieter de Laer, and the subject is repeated by Du Jardin.

The etcher mentioned above, Dirk Stoop, Jed a wandering life, went to Lisbon, became painter to the Court there, and, being brought over to England with the Infanta, worked also in London. His etchings of horses and dogs are less good than those of the court _fêtes_, processions, and spectacles at Lisbon, at Hampton Court, and at London.