The Return from Hawking

A flurry of activity greets the return of an elegant hawking party who have come to rest outside a large country house. From its Italian-style terrace, a man blows a hunting horn to herald their arrival. The household arrive to help the party and to prepare the spoils of the hunt. Amid the group’s glamour, the aftermath of the hunt plays out: the animals laid out in the foreground, the weary brown horse being led away, exhausted dogs already asleep, and the industry of the servants. On the far right, a man in humble attire looks on hopefully for a share of the feast with his children and donkey. The spotlight falls on the group at the painting’s centre. A mounted falconer holds his lively hunting bird aloft. Beside him, seated on a grey horse, a fashionably-dressed young woman turns towards another – perhaps the lady of the house – who holds out a posy of flowers in greeting. The skin of the female rider glows a pearlescent white in the shade of her parasol. The parasol was a status symbol within the global Dutch empire and is held by a turbaned attendant. Although the figures in this scene are imagined by the artist, this man is striking as the only person from the global majority within the party – a reminder of the scale of the Dutch empire and their role in the trade of enslaved people.        

While the colours in this painting have deteriorated over time, making it difficult to read in places, it epitomises the hunting scenes that dominated the work of Dutch painter Philips Wouwerman (1619-68) in the last decade of his life. Hunting was exclusively an aristocratic sport, and a privilege only granted to the Dutch nobility by the Hague Court. The appeal of Wouwerman’s hunting pictures grew among wealthy patrons and, by the eighteenth century, could be found among Europe’s most important art collections. The founders of Dulwich Picture Gallery collected ten paintings by, or associated with, Wouwerman on the London art market in the late 1790s and early 1800s – a sign of the artist’s posthumous popularity.