A Lion Hunt

In the middle of the 1610s Rubens was working out a new kind of picture, the large hunting scene, in which men, horses and wild animals are knotted into a single struggle. Around the same years he painted a hippopotamus and crocodile hunt for the Duke of Bavaria. This panel shows him thinking on wood. It is painted almost entirely in browns with touches of white, so fast that some figures are still only outlines. The hunt has turned against the hunters. A lioness lies speared, a man lies dead beneath the grey horse, and the lion has leapt at a rider on the rearing animal. Faint at the edge, another man advances with his arm raised and his eyes fixed on the lion's head, and that half-drawn figure is the only hint Rubens gives of how the fight will end.