The boar hunt

Frans Snyders was in his early seventies when he painted this, near the end of a long Antwerp career, and it is the last hunting scene he is known to have made. He had spent decades on exactly this subject: a boar cornered by the pack, the moment before the kill. He even went back to one of his own compositions from the early 1620s, now in a museum in Poznań, and reworked it here some thirty years later. Look at the dog thrown upside down, its body twisting as it falls. That kind of animal, caught mid-motion, was Snyders's specialty. For years he supplied the beasts and still-life for Rubens's larger pictures. His signature is easy to miss. He wrote it in brown paint on the collar of one of the hounds.