Horses startled by a Dog

The scene shows a rider on a brown horse, with his back to the viewer, leading a white horse by the reins. He is about to enter the river when a barking dog rushes at them. The horses are startled and a boy wielding a stick in his right hand attempts to stop the dog. The fisherman behind them appears oblivious to the scene. The poor condition of the picture`s surface hinders a proper assessment of the painting, which should be dated on compositional and stylistic grounds to the early 1650s -that is, when Wouwerman began to shed the influence of the naturalism of Pieter van Laer, il Bamboccio (1599-after 1642) and to assign greater importance to landscape. From this point onwards he no longer painted figures set in a landscape but landscapes populated with figures. This is the genre which Wouwerman would cultivate thereafter and in which he came to achieve absolute mastery.

From a compositional viewpoint, the work still displays a diagonal plane that encloses the composition on one side -here on the left- and the horizon line remains high. However, the space is flowing and homogenous, as the earlier arrangement based on clearly defined horizontal planes of colour has been replaced by an atmospheric perspective that fuses light and colour and gives the work greater overall depth. The figures continue to occupy the foreground, but are further away from the viewer and more dynamic. The group formed by the boy running after the dog is derived from Van Laer.

There is another composition by Wouwerman, The Impetuous White Horse, also on panel and almost identical in size, which appears to portray the episode that follows the scene shown in the present painting: the horseman, facing the viewer, continues to grasp the reins of the still startled white horse, but has managed to calm his own mount, which enters a ford in the river near the fisherman (Posada Kubissa, T.: Pintura holandesa en el Museo Nacional del Prado. Catálogo razonado, 2009, pp. 320-319).