This is a classic ‘sportsman’s sketch’: a rich man is shooting among the dunes, visible in the background, accompanied by a professional hunter, holding gun and two birds. The wilderness into which they have strayed has thrown them upon the mercy of a remote inn, with a cracked pot announcing the inadequacy of the hospitality on offer. A fine cavalier, colourfully dressed, centrally placed and finely mounted, with a beer pot in his hand, has his stirrup adjusted by a flustered boy, whose mother brings another drink from an interior which she shares with a pig. Farmhouses with separate lodging for humans and livestock had already been introduced in the more advanced provinces of the Netherlands. Neither mother nor son wears shoes – an infallible sign of poverty rarely seen in Dutch paintings. An old man, presumably the innkeeper, is apparently overcome with the exasperation of dealing with such exalted and exacting customers and dabs his forehead, while no doubt muttering oaths under his breath. The huntsman’s spaniel sniffs the innkeeper’s mongrel, while a horse urinates.

Reading this image by Potter (1625-54) as a comic encounter (it doesn’t quite constitute a narrative) is conjectural but reflects what must surely be a universal experience of travel, and moreover follows good literary and visual precedents. Ovid’s story of Jupiter and Mercury enjoying the frugal hospitality of the elderly peasant couple, Philemon and Baucis, was similarly painted for laughs by Adam Elsheimer, an image (now in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden) widely disseminated through Hendrick Goudt’s engraving of 1612.

Signed and dated: 'Paulus Potter. f. 1651'

Text adapted from Dutch Landscapes, London, 2010