A stag hunt

This painting, which was known to Birgit Schumacher only through an old photograph at the time of her 2006 catalogue raisonné, has been in the possession of the same family for nearly a century. It is a superlative example of Wouwerman’s art which Schumacher dates to circa 1648/49, a period of enormous transformation which saw the development of the artist’s distinctly individual approach to landscape painting. While Wouwerman still drew inspiration from other Haarlem artists, including Pieter van Laer and Isack van Ostade, by the late 1640s he developed into an outstanding painter of horses. Such intensely naturalistic qualities cannot be found in the works of his contemporaries. In the present painting, Wouwerman conveyed his abilities by depicting the horses in complicated positions like that of the foreshortened dark horse seen from behind in the painting's central foreground.

The period also saw Wouwerman increasingly abandon his earlier preference for a diagonal compositional scheme in favor of horizontally structured compositions arranged parallel to the picture plane which better integrate the complex, often intersecting, figural groups within the landscape. Concurrent with this, Wouwerman eschewed the darker tonalities of his earlier works in favor of brighter, sunlit atmospheric effects that anticipate his paintings of the 1650s.

A NOTE ABOUT THE PROVENANCE
The painting’s early provenance testifies to the appeal of Wouwerman’s works among eighteenth-century connoisseurs. In 1829, John Smith first associated the painting with a stag hunt that featured in the 1722 sale of the collection of the Rotterdam merchant Jacques Meijers (loc. cit.). While both Cornelis Hofstede de Groot and Schumacher accepted Smith’s provenance (loc. cit.), it now appears unlikely for two reasons. Firstly, a handwritten manuscript of Meijers’ sale indicates his painting measured ‘h: 2: v: 5 d; b: 3: v: 4: d:,’ larger than the present work. Secondly, thanks to the 1739 engraving by Jacques-Philippe Le Bas, we know the painting belonged to one Monsieur De Pile. It has generally been agreed that this ‘De Pile’ was none other than the art critic, artist and diplomat Roger de Piles (1635-1709), whose seven-volume L'Abrégé de la vie des peintres (Paris, 1699) influenced French taste at the dawn of the eighteenth century. Provided the identification of ‘De Pile’ is accurate, the painting cannot have been the one sold from Meijers’ collection.

The title page to the 1742 De Pile catalogue indicates the collection was ‘Brought from Paris by Mr. Geminiani,’ probably the composer Francesco Saverio Geminiani (1687-1762). Among the 83 lots were two paintings by Wouwerman, one of which was described as ‘A Stag-hunting’ and the other simply as ‘Its Companion’. Whether this painting is the stag hunt that featured in the 1742 sale or was sold separately before the sale cannot be stated with certainty. At the 1742 sale, the pair of Wouwermans were acquired by Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707-1751), the first for 70 guineas and the second for 105 guineas. If our painting is indeed the stag hunt in the 1742 sale, Frederick must have sold the painting the same year he acquired it to Augustus III through one ‘Rigaud,’ presumably Jacques Rigaud, by whom an engraving after the painting is known. The 1500 livres Augustus III paid for the painting was among the highest prices for a work by Wouwerman in the period.

With some sixty paintings by Wouwerman, the Saxon Elector’s collection came to be the most significant assemblage of the artist's work. Perhaps on account of this, in the early decades of the twentieth century the museum embarked upon a deaccession campaign that culled nearly half of these works from the collection. The present painting was one of four works - including paintings by Frans van Mieris, Meindert Hobbema and another Wouwerman - the museum earmarked for sale to the Berlin-based Galerie van Diemen as partial payment for its acquisition of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's The Triumph of Amphitrite in 1927.