A portrait of a young man on a grey mount, a landscape with a deer hunt beyond

Pieter Wouwerman was the younger brother of the celebrated horse painter Philips Wouwerman and the elder brother of the landscape painter Jan Wouwerman. A similar equestrian portrait with a rearing horse, albeit on canvas and of a larger scale, has been dated to circa 1660-65 and is today in the Instituut Collectie Nederland (inv. no. NK1635). In both that painting and the present example, the artist was probably responding to the type of equestrian portrait popularised by Thomas de Keyser in a series of paintings from the early 1660s (see, for example, de Keyser’s Pieter Schout on Horseback of 1660, also on copper, in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; inv. no. SK-A-697). The atmospheric, light and airy palette seen here suggests the painting probably post-dates these other works by several years.