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A red cow and a black-and-white companion stand on a rising meadow, one facing out with the full authority of a portrait, the other turning to graze; behind them the land falls away to a sliver of sky. Paulus Potter (1625–1654) was the supreme Dutch painter of animals, the prodigy of the Haarlem school who died at twenty-eight and left the Young Bull of the Mauritshuis as the genre’s monument; this little panel, signed and dated 1648 at his breakthrough, gives two cattle the attention a court painter spends on princes — the damp noses, the layered hide, the weight of the animals set against the enormous Dutch sky. Cattle were the wealth of the young Republic, and Potter’s cows, painted in the golden light of the polders, are portraits of that prosperity. The panel belongs to the royal collections and hangs in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).