The Hunter and a Woman

In the Dutch Republic of 1659, hunting with a gun was a privilege of the well-off, so a young man shown as a hunter was announcing his standing before he said a word. Metsu places one such hunter in an elegant interior beside a young woman, and their meeting is courtship dressed up as a social call. The code was blunt to people at the time. The Dutch word for birding, vogelen, doubled as slang for making love, so a hunter presenting the fruits of his day to a woman was making an offer of a very particular kind, and her response is the real subject of the scene. Metsu tried this hunter-and-woman encounter more than once in these years, changing the room and the mood each time. This small panel, dated 1659, is the version that made its way to Florence and the Uffizi.