Interior scenes, with figures smoking and drinking in a tavern

This small pair of genre scenes likely constitute Paulus Potter’s earliest surviving works. Signed and dated 1640, they were produced a year before Paulus’ large-scale Christ and the Samaritan Woman (present location unknown), which has traditionally been regarded as the artist’s earliest painting. Paulus, still only in his mid-teens, was then resident in Amsterdam (he would relocate to Haarlem in 1642 to apprentice with Jacob de Wet), in which place he would have been exposed to similar paintings by his father, Pieter, as well as artists like Pieter Jansz. Quast, who lived in the metropolis until 1634 and would return in 1641. While Pieter is known to have produced similar genre paintings, the signatures on this pair most closely compare with those subsequently used by Paulus.

A note on the provenance:
Born in 1821 in Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia, Wilhelm Hüffer moved to Paris in his early twenties to join leading investment and trading firm J.-P. Pescatore, rising to partner status a decade later. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Hüffer relocated to Rome where he settled at the Palazzo Borghese and established himself amongst Capitolini high society, even receiving the honorary title of Baron. In 1879, Hüffer bought a plot of land on the Via Nazionale and commissioned the French architect Jules Pellechet to build him a neoclassical palace, where the present works once hung amongst his remarkable collection of paintings, sculpture and decorative arts. Today the Villino Hüffer is owned by the Bank of Italy.