Jan Hackaert and Nicolaes Berchem, A Stag Hunt in a Forest

The picture of a hunt, with aristocratic riders wielding spears and the stag surrounded by hounds all ready for the kill, might not be to everyone’s taste today. But the speed and vitality of the animals and the huntsman blowing the horn - the stag itself moving with such energy that it still just might escape – catch the attention and hold the eye. It’s an exciting scene whatever you think of the subject.

These hunters are aristocrats and so are their strong, swift horses. The costumes are elaborate and costly – there would be plenty of servants to clean them after the day’s sport. Hunting was the prerogative of the aristocracy in mid-seventeenth century Holland; even a newly wealthy bourgeois who had bought land had to fulfil certain criteria before being given permission to hunt. Unusually in this painting, one of them is a woman. In elaborate hunting dress and riding sidesaddle, the artist shows her at an angle that enables her to deliver the death blow, though the point of her weapon is lost in the folds of her voluminous skirts. Perhaps after all the stag will live to see another day.

The staffage (figures in a painting) is by Nicholaes Berchem, the landscape by Jan Hackaert. Two artists sharing the making of a painting was quite usual at the time. Both artists were individually successful but both often collaborated with other artists as they‘ve done in this picture. Hackaert was particularly famous for his landscapes and had lived in Switzerland for a while, where forests of tall trees of many species abound. In this painting, he chooses the birch. Its high canopy of feathery foliage allows light to filter through and reflect the trees onto the calm waters of the river; two crooked trunks and a broken branch dipping into the water break the trees’ upward thrust. Further into the forest another hunt is underway, with a minute horseman and boy running with a horn just visible in the undergrowth.

Berchem’s lively figures and animals give the drama to the painting: the dogs at the heels of the stag, the riders surrounding them ready to attack, the boy horn blower splashing through the water in his cuffed boots. The grey horse is particularly successful – we can see the powerful muscles of his rump as he rears and the small details of a red bow in his harness and the red dot of his flaring nostril.

The painting once belonged to the Prince Regent (later George IV) and hung at Clarence House until 1816, when it was sold. It appeared again later at an auction and was much admired by Lady Charlotte Guest, a pioneering Victorian businesswoman and collector. She wrote how much she would like to have owned it, ‘the shadows clear and deep upon the waters, the glow gleaming through the trees’. But she was unlucky. The picture was bought by the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, passing from him to the national collection.