A landscape with falconers

Philips Wouwerman painted landscapes with falconers on horseback frequently throughout his career, with further examples today in various public collections, including those of the Gemäldegalerie Alter Meister, Dresden (inv. no. 1422); Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (inv. no. 22) and the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (inv. no. 833). While establishing a chronology of Wouwerman’s development is inhibited by the fact that only twenty-five autograph paintings are dated, the monogram in use here cannot be found in the artist’s work before 1646. Birgit Schumacher proposed in her catalogue raisonné a comparatively early dating of circa 1650-52 for this painting. The early 1650s were a period in which the artist first succeeded, as Schumacher has noted, in ‘capturing convincing depth using an ideational diagonal’ (see Schumacher, op. cit., p. 65). Similarly, in this period Wouwerman’s staffage became less dominant and the artist better integrated them within a landscape bathed in a diffuse, cool light.

Only rarely did Wouwerman repeat a composition; however, another autograph version of this painting is in the collection of the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museums (see Schumacher, op. cit., no. A138). At various points, each of these paintings has been regarded as the prime example, but Schumacher, who knew the Glasgow painting in the original and the present work from a transparency, was unable to discern a difference in quality and determine which version was painted first (loc. cit.).