A Stag Hunt

This panel, one of Wouwerman’s very earliest depictions of the hunt, is filled with a rumbunctious sense of energy and movement. In an expansive landscape, hunters on horseback, attended by servants in red livery running on foot with hunting dogs, are driving a stag towards a net slung between two trees. A huntsman on a white horse gallops in from the right, sounding the horn, as the chase reaches its climax. With the ladies’ draperies flying and the glinting of shoe iron, one can almost hear the thudding of hooves and the echoing summons of the horn. Ruined Italianate buildings, sprouting vegetation, appear in the right background, while on the left, a sandy track winds its way across marshy ground towards a remote cottage silhouetted against the early morning sky. This atmospheric landscape on the left, almost a painting within a painting, is an especially poetic passage.

Philips Wouwerman was the most successful seventeenth-century Dutch painter of equestrian scenes. He developed a wide repertoire of themes to demonstrate his virtuosity at rendering the horse. His subjects include simple, unpretentious scenes of farriers, stables, riding schools and travelers at rest, as well as larger, multi-figured compositions of hunting parties, country fairs, army encampments and cavalry battles. He was unusually prolific and, despite a relatively short career, left an oeuvre numbering nearly six hundred paintings. Apart from a short stay in Hamburg, he lived his entire life in Haarlem and according to his biographer, Arnold Houbraken, he died there a rich man. [1]

Hunting scenes, of which he painted over a hundred in various forms, were among Wouwerman’s favorite subjects. He painted them throughout his career, but in the last decade of his life they dominated his output. He depicted every aspect of the sport in variations ranging from the departure of the hunting party to the pursuit of diverse types of prey, the rest during the hunt and the return of the hunting party. The subject not only offered him the opportunity to demonstrate his talent at depicting lively scenes filled with horses and elegantly dressed people, but also found an eager audience.

Ironically, hunting was the exclusive preserve a small aristocratic elite, based at the court of the Stadholders. Ordinances limiting hunting to the nobility remained in effect until the formation of the Batavian Republic in the Netherlands in 1795. Pictures with a hunting theme – whether of hunting itself, still lifes of hunting trophies and accessories, or portraits of sitters in hunting dress – thus held a special appeal for members of a new upwardly mobile, status-conscious class.

Of exceptional interest in this work is the prominence given to the Black page in the foreground, wearing red livery. Much work in recent years has been devoted to the role of slavery played by the Dutch East India Company and the depiction of Black subjects by artists as different as Jan Steen and Rembrandt in 17th-century Holland. We are grateful to Stephanie Archangel for sharing her insights into the depiction of Black people in Dutch art. She points out that, although slavery was illegal in the Dutch Netherlands, ‘pages’ or young Black men were frequently passed on as gifts. Such a page appears in the foreground in van der Helst’s celebrated Portrait of the Militia of District VIII (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Inv. no. SK-C-375) of 1640-1643 as well as in the Family Portrait by Wouwerman’s fellow Haarlemite, Frans Hals (Madrid, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Inv. no. 179). Often as in this painting and the Militia portrait, the page is wearing red. The fact that Wouwerman so rarely includes Black figures in his paintings and that this one is so prominent here suggests that he may have been included with a specific intention, more than a mere prop to connote aristocratic elegance.

Like the vast majority of Wouwerman’s paintings, A Stag Hunt is undated, however, both the form of signature and the style of the painting suggest an early date, probably around late 1646 or early 1647. Between about 1642 and 1646 Wouwerman signed his work with the monogram ‘PH.W’, but after that he lengthened it to ‘PHIL. W’ or ‘PHILS.W’. Also consistent with the years around 1646 to 1647 are the relatively low viewpoint, the subdued palette in tones of green, beige, brown and black, with a few accents of brighter color, and the naturalistic rendering of horses. Later, Wouwerman adopted a lighter, sunnier palette and his horses became more idealized in appearance.

During this early phase of Wouwerman’s career, the main influence on his art was that of fellow townsman Pieter Van Laer (1599-after 1642), who had returned to Haarlem in 1639 after a fifteen-year stay in Rome. Van Laer’s scenes of Roman street life, which became known as bambocciate after Van Laer’s nickname ‘Bamboccio’ (clumsy figure), created a new genre that soon became popular both in Italy and the Netherlands. Wouwerman drew inspiration from van Laer’s street scenes, as well as from the older Haarlem artist’s landscapes and paintings of robbers and travelers resting at an inn. The horses in Wouwerman’s early paintings in particular recall those of Van Laer both in their conformation and in the way in which they move. Compare, for example, the galloping horses, seen from the side and from the front, in the present painting with those in an engraving by Cornelis Visscher after Pieter van Laer [2]. After 1650, Wouwerman increasingly replaced the naturalism of the horses in his early paintings with horses modelled on graceful, high-stepping Arab types.

Although already successful in his lifetime, Wouwerman’s reputation rose steadily after his death. Writing some fifty years later, Houbraken noted that “his paintings fetched a far higher price after his death than in his lifetime”. In particular, his paintings appealed to aristocratic collectors and many of his works found their way into the collections formed by European monarchs in the eighteenth century. The same is true of the present painting, which was acquired in 1742 for Augustus III, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony (1696-1763) for his picture gallery in Dresden. This painting shares the same early provenance as a work on canvas, The Collision (Dresden, Gëmaldegalerie Alte Meister, Inv. no. 1443) still in Dresden. Following its de-acquisition from Dresden in 1927, its whereabouts were unknown for nearly a century, until it recently came to light in a private collection in Europe.

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