1024 - David Vinckboons

David Vinckboons Landscape with a Hunting Party Oil on panel (parquetted). 45 x 62.5 cm. Provenance Private collection, Belgium. Through the thicket of the forest, the small retinue of a noble hunting party makes its way. A horse-drawn carriage carrying distinguished ladies travels through the landscape, while the fashionably attired huntsman in the foreground and his houndsman, with excited dogs straining at the leash, lead the group. David Vinckboons, active in Amsterdam, was a painter of landscapes, elegant society scenes, and rustic peasant festivals alike. Together with Gillis van Conincxloo (1544–1607), he established the subject of densely wooded landscapes such as the present work. Here he gracefully stages the interplay of light and shadow, of the dark forest foreground and the luminous forest middle ground. Set against the backdrop of a small castle, the forest also becomes a place where different social milieus, the nobility and the peasants on the right side of the composition, coincidentally converge. The motif of the cart also appears in forest landscapes from around 1610 in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm (fig. 1, Inv. no. 3925) and in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (Inv. no. 8576; cf. K. Ertz, C. Nitze-Ertz: David Vinckboons, Lingen 2016, p. 336, nos. 54 and 54a). We would like to thank Dr Joost Vander Auwera, Brussels, for confirming the authenticity of the work based on digital photographs. For comparative illustrations, see the printed catalogue as well as the PDF version.