Falconers setting out on a Hunt
1665 - 1668.Not on display
This painting belongs to a series of scenes of hunting parties at the entrance to country manors or villas built in a classical style. They all document a series of innovations in fashion and dressage, which reveal them to have been painted in the artist`s final phase. In keeping with this chronology, the male characters sport the French clothing and hairstyles that prevailed among the Dutch upper classes after 1665, and the way the horses are ridden -with the legs stretched forwards, causing the body to lean slightly backwards- is the result of an innovation in the art of horse-riding that was introduced at about that time.
True to his mature style, Wouwerman no longer presents a panoramic view with figures inserted into the landscape (P2147 and P2148). Instead, his interest focuses on the figures of men and animals, which, as in the hunting scenes of 1655-60, are placed in the foreground, in front of the landscape. However, the rural setting and buildings of those earlier works (P2152) have, by this stage, been replaced by more refined villas or manor houses in a classical style, depicted with Baroque fountains and sculptures and trees and flora more typical of the South.
The delicate figures of the hunters, their servants and animals -the size of which is once again rather larger than in the phase immediately preceding it -create a frieze that runs horizontal to the picture plane. As is so often the case with Wouwerman, the riders are positioned in such a way that their horses can be depicted from various different angles. Ahuge fountain, invented by the painter, rises up behind the figures, with a sculpture of Neptune standing on his chariot, ready to hurl his trident. This fountain forms a middle ground between the figures and the landscape which opens out onto a horizon that is set at a higher level than that found in the panoramic views of his earlier phase.
The scene is closed in to the right by a horizontal plane -the façade of the mansion house and the garden wall- a compositional device Wouwerman often used in his early works and which he now resumes. The vertical axes of the fountain, the black poplars and the façade of the building counteract the horizontality of the composition. The blue of the sky is reminiscent of the landscapes of the early 1660s (P2147). However, owing to the thin paint layer -indeed, the grey preparation shows through in certain zones- the hues lack the luminosity of former works. In this picture, as in the other hunting scenes in this series, the arrangement of the figures against the background is rather contrived. Moreover, there is also an obvious stylistic difference between these figures and the other compositional elements. This has led Duparc (1993) and Schumacher (2006) to suggest that, in the final years of his career, Wouwerman may have restricted his painting exclusively to figures, leaving other members of his workshop to produce the architecture and landscape backgrounds. Whatever the case, it is certainly true that the landscape here lacks the flowing execution and subtle tonal gradation for which this artist is known.
The theme of the departure for or arrival from a hunt provided Wouwerman with an opportunity to create plenty of narrative genre detail, in which the iconographic influence of Pieter van Laer (1599-after 1642) remains visible. Yet, in these final scenes there are also plenty of references to his own works, which would perhaps suggest a certain slackening in his creativity. Thus, in this case, the group formed by the white horse and the lady that hands over her son to the servant at her side, depicted with her arms raised ready to receive the child, echoes, albeit with female characters, that formed by the saint and the beggar in Saint Martin, dated 1652 (present whereabouts unknown). Further, the horse itself is taken from White Horse inside a Stable, signed and dated 1668, thought the animal`s head in the Haarlem painting is more expressive and better modelled, which seems to confirm the dating of this painting. Falconers setting out on a Hunt was one of the works selected by Madrazo to be included in the Colección litográfica de los cuadros del rey de España (Lithographic collection of the King of Spain) (Posada Kubissa, T.: Pintura holandesa en el Museo Nacional del Prado. Catálogo razonado, 2009, p. 321).
