Flemish School, 18th Century, Stop During The Hunt

Flemish school, 18th century

Stop during the hunt

Oil on canvas, cm 73 x 96

With frame, cm 81 x 107

The painting depicts a group of people, some of them on horseback, while they stop at a fountain to water dogs and horses. Fully immersed in a country scenery, near the shore of a river that is lost between their loops on the horizon, the characters in the foreground are busy resting during what seems to be a hunting trip, as evidenced by the presence of the suit of hunting dogs, guns, horses and the hawk on the woman’s arm in the center. The fountain of classical taste is composed by a niche above the statue of the god Neptune, clearly associated with the aquatic element, from whose trident gushes a jet of water that goes to collect in the basin below. The elements in the foreground are hit by a beam of light that highlights the colors of the coats, the fur of the animals and the small details of the objects; compared to the rest of the composition the colors are more In general, the role of these figures is clearly highlighted compared to the rest of the landscape. The plants, water and sky are in fact characterized by a darker tone and nuanced, while maintaining unchanged the quality of the details, almost to want to emphasize a separation or a specific moment through the more intense lighting of the foreground. The definitive liberation of landscape painting as a separate genre was in Flanders during the Golden Age, that is the seventeenth century: now city, now country, now sea, now centered inside buildings, the view explores all possible genres, through specialized workshops that guarantee a constant and widespread production, no longer episodic and limited to the particular needs of a customer.