According to Paulus Potter’s widow, the artist would put a small sketchbook in his pocket whenever he had time to take a walk. When he saw something that was intriguing or enjoyable and that might serve his purpose, he immediately sketched the subject. This anecdote about Potter’s working process may well help explain how he came upon the idea to depict this intense little drama between man and animal outside a farrier’s shop, a subject no other Dutch artist ever depicted. One can only imagine that Potter, on one of his walks near the fields outside of The Hague, was attracted by the commotion caused by a horse having its teeth filed, or floated. A large metal instrument, known as a twitch, pinched the animal’s muzzle so that it would keep its mouth open. On such an occasion Potter must have seen the horse rearing back and pawing the air with its left foreleg. He would have noted the intense concentration of the old, bespectacled farrier as he braced himself to work the rasp, and the open-mouthed expression of his younger accomplice holding the restraint. He also may have witnessed the slack-jawed gaze of the young bystander, who, with hands stuffed in his pockets, looks up at the operation in amazement. Inside the shop, hard at work at his anvil, the blacksmith takes no more interest in the proceedings than do the dogs or the chickens scratching for food. Whether Potter recorded his impressions in his sketchbook or merely carried them home in his head, the subject was so vivid in his mind that he was able to create a work that captures the emotional intensity of the moment.
Although the basic compositional scheme is one that Potter had developed in the previous year, particularly in Figures with Horses by a Stable, signed and dated 1647 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), this painting is unique in its vivid characterization of a scene. To enhance the dramatic effect Potter situated the action along a shaded diagonal wedge formed by the farrier shop and the small wooden structure attached to it, known as the brake. Long shadows on the ground and the brightly illuminated white horse behind the central group of figures accentuate the chiaroscuro contrasts between foreground and background. Gray smoke from the blacksmith’s fire rises from the chimney and merges into the dark clouds of the windswept sky.
It is not known what influences inspired Potter to develop this compositional scheme, although enough similarities exist between it and paintings by Pieter van Laer (Dutch, c. 1592 - 1642) and Isack van Ostade (Dutch, 1621 - 1649) to suggest that Potter might have been familiar with works by those artists (see, for example, Van Ostade’s The Halt at the Inn and Workmen before an Inn). Indeed, Potter apparently spent some time in Haarlem in the mid-1640s. It was only after he joined the Saint Luke’s Guild in Delft in 1646, however, that he began to incorporate contre-jour light effects, which he would have learned from Italianate painters.
As is evident from the anecdote about his walks with his sketchbook, and also from his drawings [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] Paulus Potter, Study of a Horse, pencil, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham and etchings, Potter observed the world carefully and recorded his impressions without idealization. A comparison of the study of a horse in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts and the white horse in A Farrier’s Shop suggests that he composed his paintings on the basis of such drawings. Presumably, comparable studies from life also existed for other figures in this painting.
The intense realism of Potter’s style was particularly appreciated in the nineteenth century, and his works commanded enormous sums of money. This painting, for example, fetched 15,000 francs in the Perregaux sale of 1841, perhaps in part because of the enthusiastic, and extensive, description in the sale catalog. The special place reserved for the painting within this esteemed artist’s oeuvre is particularly evident in the concluding sentence of the catalog entry: “En dernière analyse, c’est un tableau de Paul Potter aussi parfait de coloris, de faire, de sentiment, de verité, que les plus beaux qu’il ait jamais enfantes, avec l’avantage inappreciable d’une composition plus savante, plus variée et plus animée.”
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.
April 24, 2014
