Stag Hunt

When the English painter Joshua Reynolds toured the Dutch Republic in 1781, he visited this gallery and came away with reservations. Some of the pictures, he felt, were far too large for the room, and this hunting scene was one he had in mind. It is more than two metres high and nearly three and a half metres wide.

Two Antwerp painters made it. Paul de Vos, a specialist in hunts and animals, painted the chase, and Jan Wildens painted the landscape around it.

Prince William V, who was fond of hunting pictures, bought it in 1771, when the collection of the Amsterdam merchant Gerret Braamcamp was sold. Agents of Catherine the Great bought at the same sale, and the pictures they shipped to Saint Petersburg went down with the ship Vrouw Maria off the coast of Finland that October. This one belongs to the Mauritshuis and hangs in its Gallery Prince Willem V on the Buitenhof, the room Reynolds found too small for it.