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Lot Essay
Around 1610 Frans Snyders increasingly turned his attention to hunting scenes like this painting, which Hella Robels dates to about 1620. While Snyders' earliest forays into these subjects suffer from a certain stiffness, perhaps due to the artist's unfamiliarity with working on such a large scale, by the time he executed this painting he had developed a greater freedom and vitality of style. Indeed, in her monograph on the artist, Susan Koslow described this painting and its putative pendant of a Bear Hunt as 'splendid pictures [that] situate the animals close to the picture plane in a tightly compressed, turbulent relief of interlocking bodies' (loc. cit.).
The painting was once a part of the celebrated collection formed by the Marqués de Leganés, whom Peter Paul Rubens praised in a letter dated 27 January 1628 to the French scholar Pierre Dupuy as 'one of the greatest connoisseurs of this age' (see R. Magurn, The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, Cambridge, MA, 1955, no. 145). Leganés was the fourth son of the Count of Uceda and rose to prominence at the Spanish Court during the first decade of the reign of Philip IV due to his close relationship with Gaspar de Guzmán, the Count-Duke of Olivares, the King's prime minister and favorite. The Marqués had begun to collect paintings around this time, as indicated by the seventeen works, mostly 16th-century Italian paintings, described in a 1630 inventory of his house in Madrid. His collection evidently grew exponentially over the course of the next twelve years, for when a second inventory was drawn up in 1642 it numbered 1,149 paintings. A large number were by living Flemish artists, with Snyders being represented by numerous works, four of which are today in the collection of the Museo del Prado, Madrid (see H. Robels, op. cit., nos. 42, 194, 195, 203). Leganés continued to collect toward the end of his life, but not on the scale he had in the 1630s and early 1640s. His posthumous inventory drawn up in 1655 lists 1,333 paintings. The entire collection was disbursed within a few decades of his death due to conflicting claims of inheritance.
This painting, which has been cut down along the top edge and for which Snyders' frequent collaborator, Jan Wildens, supplied the background landscape, is the prime version of a composition also known in three studio versions (see Robels, op. cit., nos 247a-c).
The painting was once a part of the celebrated collection formed by the Marqués de Leganés, whom Peter Paul Rubens praised in a letter dated 27 January 1628 to the French scholar Pierre Dupuy as 'one of the greatest connoisseurs of this age' (see R. Magurn, The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, Cambridge, MA, 1955, no. 145). Leganés was the fourth son of the Count of Uceda and rose to prominence at the Spanish Court during the first decade of the reign of Philip IV due to his close relationship with Gaspar de Guzmán, the Count-Duke of Olivares, the King's prime minister and favorite. The Marqués had begun to collect paintings around this time, as indicated by the seventeen works, mostly 16th-century Italian paintings, described in a 1630 inventory of his house in Madrid. His collection evidently grew exponentially over the course of the next twelve years, for when a second inventory was drawn up in 1642 it numbered 1,149 paintings. A large number were by living Flemish artists, with Snyders being represented by numerous works, four of which are today in the collection of the Museo del Prado, Madrid (see H. Robels, op. cit., nos. 42, 194, 195, 203). Leganés continued to collect toward the end of his life, but not on the scale he had in the 1630s and early 1640s. His posthumous inventory drawn up in 1655 lists 1,333 paintings. The entire collection was disbursed within a few decades of his death due to conflicting claims of inheritance.
This painting, which has been cut down along the top edge and for which Snyders' frequent collaborator, Jan Wildens, supplied the background landscape, is the prime version of a composition also known in three studio versions (see Robels, op. cit., nos 247a-c).