1129 - Schelte a Bolswert after Peter Paul Rubens, Landscape with a Stag Hunt, Antwerp c. 1640

Schelte a Bolswert after Peter Paul Rubens, Landscape with a Stag Hunt, Antwerp c. 1640 Engraving and etching on laid paper, inserted into a support, below the image lettered in the plate at the left Pet. Paul. Rubens pinxit. S. à Bolswert sculpsit., at the right the publisher's address Gillis Hendricx excudit. A dense woodland interior with tall deciduous trees and a mighty fallen trunk lying across the right, through whose branches bright morning light breaks; in the left middle ground a stag flees before the pack, at upper left two birds rising into flight. Condition commensurate with age, browned, foxed, locally rubbed, the edges stained and locally slightly torn, image 30.5x45 cm (HxW), overall 50x60 cm (HxW). Schelte Adamsz. a Bolswert, born about 1586 in Bolsward and died in Antwerp in 1659, trained with his elder brother Boetius and became a free master of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1625/26. After his brother's death in 1633 he entered the service of Peter Paul Rubens as his house engraver and continued to work from his designs after Rubens's death in 1640; he cut exclusively with the burin and is regarded as the most important interpreter of Rubens's landscapes. The model is the painting Wooded Landscape at Daybreak with a Stag Hunt of about 1635, which Rubens painted after acquiring the castle of Het Steen and which is today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The sheet belongs to the series of the Small Landscapes; the Antwerp publisher Gillis Hendricx, active from 1640 to 1677, took over the plates and added his address to the impressions. A sheet for collectors of old master prints and of the Rubens following.