Landscape with Sportsmen and Game

Surrounded by dogs and the slack bodies of hunted game, a young man puts great effort into sounding his hunting horn – his cheeks puffed out and red. Towering over him, to the left, is a copse of silver birch trees. The artist has delighted in rendering their peeling, gnarled and knotted trunks, so much so that they take up half of the canvas. The striking blue leaves in the foreground below are in fact the result of a chemical change which has taken place in the paint over time. A coloured pigment named yellow lake may have been laid as a glaze over blue in order to render the leaves green. This pigment either faded or was accidentally removed during historic restoration, leaving only the blue of the leaves behind, forming a ghostly centrepiece in the painting’s foreground.

This large landscape is regarded as one of the outstanding achievements of the Dutch artist Adam Pynacker (1622-73), painted in his mature style of the 1660s when he was living in Amsterdam. The poses of the hunting dogs were borrowed by the artist from a painting by one of his leading contemporaries, Ludolf de Jongh (1616-79), which Pynacker presumably recorded through a sketch and reused on more than one occasion.