A Forest at Dawn with a Deer Hunt

A Forest at Dawn with a Deer Hunt

A Forest at Dawn with a Deer Hunt

Artist:Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, Siegen 1577–1640 Antwerp)
Date:ca. 1635
Medium:Oil on wood
Dimensions:24 1/4 x 35 1/2 in. (61.5 x 90.2 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Purchase, The Annenberg Foundation, Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, Michel David-Weill, The Dillon Fund, Henry J. and Drue Heinz Foundation, Lola Kramarsky, Annette de la Renta, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, The Vincent Astor Foundation, and Peter J. Sharp Gifts; special funds, gifts, and other gifts and bequests, by exchange, 1990

Rubens painted about three dozen landscapes during his busy career, mostly for his own pleasure. The late ones, like this superb example, transform earlier Flemish models through fresh studies of nature and color and brushwork ultimately inspired by Titian. Here hunting is treated as a contest of elemental forces: light and darkness, life and death, growth and decay.
Catalogue Entry
This superb picture of about 1635 is the only finished landscape painting (as opposed to an oil sketch) by Rubens in an American collection. Almost all of the approximately three dozen known landscape paintings by Rubens, who made them largely for his own pleasure, have long been secure in British and Continental collections, many of them royal or princely.

The present title goes back to the 1640 inventory of Rubens’s estate, where no. 108 is described as "Un bois avec un chasse à l’aube de jour, sur fond de bois." However, when the panel was sold in the auction of the celebrated Lansdowne collection in 1806 its subject was said to be "A Grand Landscape; scene, the Sun setting in fervid Heat, darting its fierce Rays from behind a Wood . . . it almost dazzles the eye to look at it." The connoisseur and collector Sir Abraham Hume noted in his copy of the sale catalogue that Sir Joshua Reynolds had once owned the picture, and that "Sir W. W. Wynne" was the successful bidder. Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn (1772–1840), 5th Baronet, and his descendants kept the landscape at their seat, Llangedwyn Hall in North Wales, until the death of the tenth baronet in 1987. After brief periods in the family estate and the art trade the picture—perhaps the last Rubens landscape available—was purchased by the Museum with the help of numerous funds and friends.

The intensity and the red and yellow colors of the sunlight strongly suggest that the sun is setting; the deer, chased by a hunter and his hounds, are running for shelter in the deepening shadows of the forest. Rubens often suggested in his landscapes an encounter of elemental forces, such as light penetrating darkness, a struggle between life and death, or the cycle of growth and decay. Here the twisted forms of old trees contrast with the slender trunks of new ones and in their impetuous rhythms add to the sense of urgency and life surging throughout nature.

Rubens’s later landscapes especially may be traced back to his Northern roots, such as the forest landscapes of about 1600 by Roelant Savery and Gillis van Coninxloo. In general he carried their ideas further, and modified them in ways reflecting Rubens’s esteem of Titian and Adam Elsheimer and his fresh experience of the Flemish countryside. (The painter’s country estate at Elewijt was purchased in 1635 and appears romantically transformed in works such as Landscape with the Chateau Het Steen in the National Gallery, London.)

The panel is composed of ten pieces, in a configuration suggesting that a smaller support was expanded on all sides, especially at the top, left, and right. This probably occurred at an early moment in the course of work. Supports made in this impromptu manner usually occur in Rubens’s oeuvre when the object was intended for his own use.

[2011; adapted from Liedtke 1992]

Provenance

the artist, Peter Paul Rubens, Antwerp (until d. 1640; inv., 1640, no. 108); Sir Joshua Reynolds, London (sold for £100 to Chauncey); Charles and Nathaniel Chauncey, London (until 1790; their estate sale, Christie's, London, March 26–27, 1790, no. 87, for 62 gns. to Lansdowne); William, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, Lansdowne House, London (1790–d. 1805; his estate sale, Lansdowne House, March 19, 1806, no. 62, for 305 gns. to Williams-Wynn); Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, 5th Baronet, Llangedwyn Hall, Oswestry, Wales (1806–d. 1840); the Baronets Watkin Williams-Wynn, Llangedwyn Hall (1840–1951); Sir Owen Watkin Williams-Wynn, 10th Baronet, Wynnstay, Denbigh, Wales (1951–87; transferred to Trustees of the 1987 Williams-Wynn Settlement); Trustees of the 1987 Williams-Wynn Settlement (1987–89; sale, Christie's, London, December 8, 1989, no. 68, for £3,000,000 to Artemis); [Artemis, Agnew, and E. V. Thaw, London, 1989–90; sold to MMA]

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