Dutch Pantry, oil on panel, 17th-century Dutch school. Signed in the lower center corner, oil on oak panel. Dimensions: 79 x 60 cm, framed dimensions: 125 x 106 cm. Possibly by Pieter Symonsz Potter (Netherlands, 1597–1652). “In the Stable.” Oil on panel. With the inscription “Eschayen” in the lower left corner. Dimensions: 60 x 78 cm; 106 x 124.5 cm (framed). This panel depicts an everyday scene of the period, featuring a maidservant busy with her work inside a large stable with wooden walls and ceiling. Beside her, almost as if it were a still life, we see all kinds of objects and foodstuffs: meats, vegetables, dead birds, and all sorts of containers, combined with the presence of live animals (a cat and two poultry). The scene is completed by the presence of a cow on the right, behind the figure of the woman bending over to pour milk into a large tub. This combination of genre painting, with its inconsequential and everyday subject matter, and the prominent presence of food and other objects typical of still-life painting, was common within the Dutch Baroque school, in the context of the formation and independence of new pictorial genres. A painter of the Flemish Golden Age, Potter was the town clerk of his native city of Enkhuizen, according to Arnold Houbraken (1660-1719), a Flemish painter and writer who continued the biographies of painters begun by Karen van Mander in the 16th century. He married Aechtje Bartsius, sister of the painter Willem Bartsius (c. 1612-1639), and was the father of the painter Pieter Potter II. He began his training as a glass painter, though in 1628 he abandoned this career and moved to Leiden to learn oil painting techniques. He remained in Leiden for three years, until 1631, when he moved to Amsterdam, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life, except for a two-year stay in The Hague between 1647 and 1649. Primarily known for his genre scenes and rural landscapes, Potter joined the Guild of Saint Luke in 1646 and the Confrerie Picturia of The Hague in 1647. The latter was a less academic association than the Guild of Saint Luke, and in some ways reactionary to it. Besides his more familiar subjects, this painter also produced portraits, scenes from the Old and New Testaments, classical mythology, and literary subjects, some of which were conceived as models for engravings. Still lifes also constitute a significant part of his output. Within his genre paintings, we can distinguish several themes: cheerful groups of ordinary people, scenes of peasant life and folk subjects, as well as military motifs (army encampments, skirmishes, and interior scenes featuring soldiers—the latter a true novelty for the time). Currently, Pieter Symonsz Potter is represented in the Louvre Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Museum in Warsaw, the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Wawel Castle in Krakow, the Museum of Fine Arts in Poitiers, the National Gallery of Norway, and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels, among other important public and private collections.
