Le chasseur de butors

The bird gets the light. A dead bittern, grey and gold, hangs from a wooden rack at the front of the picture, held up towards us by a hunter standing back in the half dark, dressed in a costume out of the studio rather than anything a miller's son from Leiden would have worn to shoot. The face under the cap is Rembrandt's own. He signed it along the top, Rembrandt fe 1639.

His contemporaries heard a joke in it. Vogelen, to go birding, was ordinary slang for sex, and a man displaying his catch this insistently was saying something other than what he had brought home for dinner. Dresden still puts that reading on the label.

Hunting in the Dutch Republic was largely reserved to the nobility and the landed, and the bittern was marsh game that reached the tables of the people who could afford to shoot it.