Deer Hunt

El Pardo, north of Madrid, was the palace the Spanish kings used for hunting, and the inventory of Charles II's estate found this canvas there in 1701, hanging in the room of portraits. A small Flemish picture, the clerk wrote, of a stag being killed by dogs, in a black and gilt frame. By 1747 it had been set over a door, one of two overdoors in the seventh room, which suits its shape, 58 centimetres high and 112 wide. The Prado dates it no more closely than the 16th and 17th centuries, and when the museum catalogued it in 1857 it went in as school of Snyders. That entry is also the one that says where the rest of the pack is, coming in from the right and from the left.