Ontwerp voor een standbeeld van Paulus Potter

About this artwork

hoogte 30,5 cm x breedte 11 cm x diepte 11 cm

Art Historical Context

This clay maquette, created by Belgian sculptor Eugène Lacomblé between 1860 and 1880, represents a preparatory design for a full-scale statue of Paulus Potter. Standing just over 30 centimeters tall, the compact model captures the essence of the proposed monument in three dimensions. Clay was a favored medium for such studies because it allowed artists to quickly refine proportions, gestures, and details before committing to more permanent materials like bronze or stone. Paulus Potter (1625–1654) was a celebrated Dutch Golden Age painter renowned for his remarkably lifelike depictions of animals, especially cattle in pastoral landscapes. By the mid-nineteenth century, when this design was made, there was renewed interest across Europe in honoring earlier national artistic heroes through public sculpture. Lacomblé’s working model therefore reflects both a tribute to Potter’s legacy and the period’s broader enthusiasm for commemorative monuments. As a rare surviving sketch in three dimensions, the piece offers visitors a glimpse into the sculptural process—showing how an idea moves from malleable clay to a finished public work. Its modest scale invites close looking, revealing the artist’s attention to the painter’s characteristic attributes, such as perhaps a palette or an animal companion.

About the Artist

Eugène Lacomblé · 1828–1905

Eugène Lacomblé (1828–1905) was a versatile Belgian artist who worked primarily as a sculptor but also practiced painting, watercolor, drawing, and etching, embodying the nineteenth-century ideal of the multi-talented artist-craftsman. Born in Brussels and dying in Arnhem, Lacomblé's career spanned the second half of the nineteenth century, a period of significant artistic and social change in Eur...