Heron Hunting with the Archduke Leopold William

In 1652 Archduke Leopold William, who governed the Spanish Netherlands for the king of Spain, took back Gravelines and then Dunkirk from the French. David Teniers, his court painter, shows him as the rider in the hat at the front of the group on the left, watching from a rise while falcons bring down a heron. Brussels, his capital, lies on the horizon. The Louvre reads the scene as more than sport. A heron fighting off falcons stands for a struggle whose outcome no one can predict, like any act of war. The Teniers specialist Margret Klinge went further and saw the heron as the Spanish Netherlands, pressed by France to the south and the Dutch to the north, holding out against the odds. The museum calls that reading fragile. In 1784 the picture was bought for Louis XVI at the sale of the comte de Vaudreuil, Grand Falconer of France.