Paulus Potter loved himself some bulls and sheep. The Dutchman's portraits of barnyard animals are some of the first paintings to give animals center stage in paintings.

Before Potter, animals were supporting characters in human dramas or small bits of large landscapes. He painted not only the wildly popular life size The Young Bull but also the cheeky Pissing Cow, which offers a full-on view of urine pouring out of a cow's pee hole.

He may have been a bit of a scoundrel though. He made Pissing Cow for the widow of the governor of the Dutch Republic. She commissioned some kind of lovely dairy cow scene and Potter delivered a rear-view of a cow as it was taking a leak. The work was, surprise, rejected by the court. 

He was also sued by the royal court for non-delivery and left The Hague for Amsterdam when his name became mud. In Amsterdam, leading citizen and famous surgeon Nicolaes Tulp, who had twenty-years earlier asked Rembrandt van Rijn to paint the famous The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, commissioned Potter to make a portrait of his son, Dirck. Potter took a painting he couldn't sell, some guy sitting on a horse, and changed the face to Dirck's. Quick and easy.

Potter didn't live long.  He died at 28. At some point around 1654, a poor soul with consumption, the highly contagious infection tuberculosis, either coughed or sneezed on him and that was that. The disease was often fatal, even up into the 20th century.