Wolf and Fox Hunt

Wolf and Fox Hunt

Wolf and Fox Hunt

Artist:Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, Siegen 1577–1640 Antwerp) and Workshop
Date:ca. 1616
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:96 5/8 x 148 1/8 in. (245.4 x 376.2 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1910

With characteristic business acumen, Rubens created a market for a new art form: very large hunting scenes painted on canvas, of which this one is the first. The few earlier examples were either models for or copies after tapestries, but Rubens’s large "hunts" of about 1616–21 were made as replacements for that very expensive medium. This canvas, originally more symmetrical in design, was trimmed at the top and left side because (according to a client in 1616) "none but great Princes have houses fitt to hange it up in." Rubens painted the picture with the help of assistants but declared that the wolves were his own work.

Catalogue Entry
This very large hunting scene by Rubens and his workshop was painted in 1616, as the first of the great hunting pictures that the artist produced in this period. It was soon followed in about 1617 by a set of four large hunting scenes for the Duke of Bavaria. One of these, the Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt, remains in Munich (Alte Pinakothek); another three went to the museums in Rennes, Marseilles, and Bordeaux in the wake of the Napoleonic wars; and the last was destroyed by fire in 1870. Rubens was well aware of the watercolor cartoons that were painted as full-scale models for tapestries of hunting scenes during the 1500s; canvas copies of important tapestries are also known. With the Wolf and Fox Hunt, however, Rubens effectively introduced a modern replacement for tapestries, which had long been a form of princely decoration requiring much greater expenditures of time and money.
The canvas was originally much larger, about 11 or 12 x 18 feet rather than the present 8 x 12 1/3 feet. It was cut down mainly at the top and left; the two wolves were approximately central in the composition. The circumstances are uncertain, but it appears likely that the painting was cut down in Rubens’s own studio after a few possible clients—including Archduke Albert, governor of the Spanish Netherlands—found its scale unmanageably grand. In a letter dated December 30, 1616, Toby Matthew wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton, a distinguished collector and English ambassador at The Hague, that Rubens was making a second version on a smaller scale (probably the workshop replica at Corsham Court) because this one was "so very bigge, that none but great Princes have houses fitt to hange it up in." Finally, Matthew reported to Carleton on April 24, 1617, that "the great peece of hunting" had been sold for a hundred pounds. The buyer was almost certainly the Duke of Aarschot, whose collection was sold after his death in Madrid in 1640. This painting and five others from Aarschot’s collection were acquired by the Marquis of Leganés; the Wolf and Fox Hunt is listed in the 1642 inventory of the marquis’s collection (no. 1126, "Una pintura de caça de lobos y çorras") and in the 1655 inventory of his estate (no. 1125, the number painted on the canvas to the lower left).
In canvases of this size Rubens used workshop assistants for the initial laying in of the design, the background and subordinate details. He would then go over the surface, strengthening contours, adding highlights and shadows, and textural effects to fabrics, fur, hair and so on. Rubens insisted to Carleton (through Matthew) on his own responsibility for the execution of the wolves and foxes, after the name of his sometime assistant Frans Snyders had come up.
In the picture’s composition the artist managed to bring together such diverse sources as Flemish tapestries (from which the unexpected falcon to the right ultimately derives), equestrian illustrations, Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari (after which Rubens made a famous drawing), and for the horse and rider to the left his own dramatically foreshortened Equestrian Portrait of Giancarlo Doria, of about 1606 (Palazzo Spinola, Genoa). As usual, however, Rubens’s artistic learning is subsumed within overwhelming impressions of energy, rhythm, color, and vivid passages of observation, so that his noble patrons—only large landowners had hunting privileges— must have looked upon paintings like this one as if they were scenes from the most exciting days of their own lives.
[2011; based on Liedtke 1984 and Bauman and Liedtke 1992]

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