Paulus Potter was born in 1625 to Pieter Potter and Aechtie Barsius in the town of Enkhuizen on IJsselmeer, a lake in the northern Netherlands. Both his father and his mother’s brother were painters, and it was possibly because of this early exposure to the medium that Potter’s first dated work is from 1640. He joined the Delft guild in 1646 and three years later became a member of the guild in The Hague, which offered more patronage and commercial opportunities for artists. It was while in The Hague that he married the daughter of a local architect in 1650. He moved to Amsterdam in 1652 and died there prematurely from tuberculosis.

Potter was particularly skilled at depicting fauna and despite his short life was an innovative and influential artist. His keen sensitivity to the natural world is most notable in his detailed animal portraits in which animals are the sole subject rather than the backdrop of a work.