of the law of contrasts, the painter has beautifully graded the strong tints and the dark shading of the animal.  The darkest part is opposed to the light portion of the sky, and the most energetic and ingrained characteristic of the bull is opposite to all that is most limpid in the atmosphere.  But this is hardly a merit, considering the simplicity of the problem.  The rest is simply a surplus that we might cut away without regret, to the great advantage of the picture.”

That would be a brutal criticism, but an exact one.  And yet public opinion, less punctilious or more clear-sighted, would say that the signature was well worth the price.

Public opinion never goes entirely astray.  By uncertain roads, often by those not most happily chosen, it arrives definitely at the expression of a true sentiment.  The motives that lead it to acclaim any one are not always of the best, but there are always other good reasons that justify this expression.  It is deceived regarding titles, sometimes it mistakes faults for excellencies, it estimates a man for his manner, and that is the least of all his merits; it believes that a painter paints well when he paints badly and because he paints minutely.  What is astonishing in Paul Potter is the imitation of objects carried to the point of eccentricity.  People do not know, or do not notice, that in such a case the soul of the painter is of more worth than the work, and that his manner of feeling is of infinitely greater importance than the result.

When he painted The Bull in 1647, Paul Potter was not twenty-three years of age.  He was a very young man; and according to the usual run of young men of twenty-three years, he was a child.  To what school did he belong?  To none.  Had he any masters?  We do not know of any other teachers than his father Pieter Simonsz Potter, an obscure painter, and Jacob de Wet (of Haarlem), who had no force to influence a pupil either for good or evil.  Paul Potter then found around his cradle and afterwards in the studio of his second master nothing but simple advice and no doctrines; very strange to say, the pupil did not need anything more.  Until 1647 Paul Potter divided his time between Amsterdam and Haarlem, that is to say, between Frans Hals and Rembrandt in the focus of the most active, the most inspiring and the richest art of celebrated masters that the world had ever known except during the preceding century in Italy.  Professors were not lacking, the choice was only too embarrassing.  Wynants was forty-six; Cuyp, forty-two; Terburg, thirty-nine; Ostade, thirty-seven; Metzu, thirty-two; Wouwerman, twenty-seven; and Berghem, about his own age, was twenty-three years of age.  Many of the youngest even were members of the Guild of St. Luke.  Finally, the greatest of all, the most illustrious, Rembrandt, had already produced the Night Watch, and he was a master to tempt one.