A Huntsman Taking a Refreshment
Provenance
Private Collection, France
Two humble men, accompanied by a dog and a white nag, are resting at the edge of a path in the shade of an imposing tree trunk and thick bushes. A gentleman in a wide-brimmed hat adorned with red feathers, mounted on a muscular bay horse, approaches the group. The two men must abandon their break to carry out their work, which consists of serving the young nobleman during his hunting trip. A servant promptly gets up and offers his master a flask filled with wine from the bottle on which the other man is leaning. The young nobleman’s activity, although temporarily interrupted, can be deduced from the scene taking place in the background, where a small hunter on horseback and two attendants follow the greyhounds across the hills.
This oil on copper, depicting A Huntsman Taking a Refreshment, reveals the technique and style of a Northern artist who was nonetheless aware of the pictorial innovations developing in Rome during the early 17th century. While the overall composition, with its tree backdrop creating an area of shadow contrasting with the brightness of the background, is reminiscent of the delicate branches of Adam Elsheimer and his followers, the succession of hills in the distance recalls some of Paul Bril’s later works, which were also taken up, in part, by Filippo Napoletano and Jan Pynas. However, it is the way the animals are rendered that provides the first clue to its author: the Haarlem-born painter Pieter Boddingh, who, in adulthood, changed his name to Van Laer.[1]
Van Laer was the pioneer of Bambocciate, a new genre of painting focused on depicting everyday life such as street, tavern, and market scenes usually featuring humble protagonists. He established these innovative pictorial subjects during his years in Rome (from ca. 1625/1626 to 1637), where he became a member of the Schildersbent under the nickname Bamboccio. However, Van Laer was first and foremost a landscape painter, as recalled by Joachim von Sandrart, with whom he went drawing sur le motif in the Roman countryside, taking as much interest in the various moments of the day as in studying animals.[2] The meager white nag in the oil on copper under review highlights the painter’s penchant for naturalism: he captures its thinness through its bony hips and ribs and its fatigue through the downward pose of its neck. A similar adherence to reality can be found in many of the artist’s works, from the early drawing depicting Two Travelers with a Horse Waiting for the Ferry (dated 1625, Prentenkabinet Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden, PK-T-AW-474; fig. 1) to the engravings depicting animals dedicated to Ferdinando Afan de Rivera in 1636.[3] Even the subject of an aristocratic hunt, so distant from the slum imagery with which we automatically associate Bamboccio, was certainly executed several times by the artist, as confirmed by Jan Ossenbeck’s engraving from a lost Van Laer painting depicting a Boar Hunt.[4]
Dated around 1625, the Horseman Waiting for a Ferry, formerly in the Ellis collection and sold at auction in 2006 (Sotheby’s, London, 7 December 2006, lot 153; fig. 2)[5], features an elegant man on horseback with a feathered hat set against a landscape that is extremely Nordic in its execution and even reminiscent of Dutch landscapes made by Esaias and Jan van de Velde, artists who influenced the young Bamboccio. Signed P. B. (Pieter Boddingh), the date coincides with Van Laer’s passage through France on his way to Italy, as confirmed by the presence of the cadenette, a longer lock of hair that characterized the horseman’s hairstyle fashionable in France at the time. The work formerly in Ellis collection attests to Van Laer’s style before his arrival in Italy, showcasing his predisposition toward the landscape genre, which he learned in his homeland. More mature is an oil on copper dated around 1628 and representing a Landscape with Hunters at Rest (Saint Petersburg, Hermitage Museum, ГЭ-1053; fig. 3). In this piece, there are numerous elements that recur in the landscape under consideration: the wicker flask from which the villager sitting on the ground drinks, the physiognomies of the greyhounds, the interaction between the hunter on horseback and his servant handing him a drink, as well as the muscular bay horse in the center of the Russian painting, which, like ours, is characterized by a white stripe along the muzzle and the white flounces starting from the hooves of the front legs. Based on these clues, A Huntsman Taking a Refreshment can be placed between the aforementioned Horseman Waiting for a Ferry and the Russian museum painting. While the Hermitage copper already shows typical Bambocciate motifs, our work attests to Van Laer’s style when he had just arrived in Rome.
Although they could not be more different in subject matter, both Van Laer’s humble, dark bambocciate paintings and his sunny landscapes often populated by aristocrats and their servants achieved great success in Rome. Collectors avidly purchased his works, for which he was able to charge high prices. Van Laer also shipped numerous works back to the Netherlands, where they commanded even greater sums. Agents and dealers must have been involved in facilitating these sales, both in Rome and especially in the case of works Van Laer sent to the North, though notably, at the very end of his life, he is said to have refused to sell his works to art dealers. Hunting for sport was for centuries a favorite aristocratic pastime and typically an exclusive right limited to noble participants. Small cabinet paintings like the present work could have been purchased by high-ranking and more modest collectors alike, who would have appreciated their high quality, technical ingenuity, and idealized representations of often gruesome subjects. In the case of the Huntsman Taking Refreshment, an aristocratic activity is shown at its most idyllic. Collectors of high rank might have enjoyed seeing their leisure activities presented in a romanticized, flattering manner, while urban collectors of lower status, lacking the privilege to engage in such pursuits, may have expressed their social aspirations by owning such images and displaying them in their homes.❖
Kelly Galvagni