Forest Scene with Hunters

In 1606 Emperor Rudolf II sent his court painter Roelant Savery out of Prague and into the mountains of the Tyrol. The emperor collected wonders of nature for his cabinet of curiosities, and Savery's task was to draw them, peaks, waterfalls, gorges and torrents. He spent the better part of two years there and came back with sheets full of rocks and mountain views.

Those drawings fed his pictures for decades. The Boston museum thinks this panel was painted around 1615, after Savery had left Prague for Amsterdam, and it reads it as a landscape made from memory. Mountain scenery from the Tyrol, birds and animals from Rudolf's menagerie, castles he had passed travelling along the Rhine, all gathered into one imagined forest. Tiny hunters move through the undergrowth beneath huge old trees, and in the distance a tower stands by a pale lake.

That mix of fantasy and close detail set it apart from the plainer, more matter-of-fact Dutch landscapes about to come into fashion. Until 1910 the panel belonged to the Mniszech family at Wiśniowiec, in what is now western Ukraine, and that year it was sold in Paris.