The Stag Hunt

For about 150 years this small copper plate belonged to a castle in Franconia. By 1719 it was listed in the inventory of Lothar Franz von Schönborn, prince-bishop of Bamberg and archbishop of Mainz, who had just built Schloss Weissenstein at Pommersfelden and filled its gallery with paintings. A catalogue printed there in 1746 calls it a Perforce hunt. In a par force hunt, a sport of the French and German courts, a pack of hounds ran a stag until it was exhausted while the riders followed at the gallop. Wouwerman painted this around 1659 or 1660, and the museum points out that he left out the violence of the kill. Elegant hunters gallop, the dogs strain ahead and the stags run for their lives, and the warm light and pastel sky recall the imaginary Italian landscapes that sold so well in Holland at the time. The Schönborn heirs sold the picture in Paris in 1867, and it later belonged to the Earl of Dudley in London. In 2002 Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, collectors from Marblehead near Boston, bought it at Sotheby's, and it hangs at the MFA as their promised gift to the museum's Center for Netherlandish Art.