La Chasse au lion et au léopard

Around 1617 Peter Paul Rubens was the most sought-after painter in Europe, and demand had turned his Antwerp studio into a kind of production line. His hunt scenes, tangles of horses, spearmen and big cats locked together, were among his most wanted inventions, and versions left the studio in numbers, painted by assistants over his designs. This lion and leopard hunt is one of those workshop productions rather than a canvas from Rubens' own hand. The composition is his, close to the tiger hunt now in Rennes, with no calm anywhere and every line pulling toward the center where a lion has a horseman by the arm. It later entered the Saxon rulers' collection in Dresden, who bought Rubens by the roomful in the 1700s.