Hunter with Hounds at the Edge of a Wood

c. 1696

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 46 cm × width 60.8 cm
outer size: depth 11.5 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature and date, bottom right (A and B ligated): ABeeldemaker . F / 169[.]

Technical notes

Support The plain-weave canvas has been wax-resin lined. All tacking edges have been removed. Very slight cusping is visible on all sides.
Preparatory layers The single, light grey-beige ground extends up to the current edges of the support. It consists of coarse white and orange pigment particles and finer ochre-coloured and black pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the current edges of the support. The composition was built up from the back to the front and from dark to light. First a brownish undermodelling was applied for the landscape, and the sky was laid in with a reserve for the upper half of the tree on the left. The hunter, the five dogs in the foreground and the lower part of the tree were executed over the undermodelling, followed by the bushes, hills, architecture and other trees. The small figures and dogs in the background were painted over the finished landscape. The dogs have a greyish brown underlayer that was left uncovered here and there. The plants in the right foreground, with their large leaves and delicate highlights, were added in the final stage. The paint layer is opaque and dense and has little impasto. The reserve for the tree on the left included an extra branch and the black-and-white dog’s nose was originally bigger and painted slightly higher up. An element, probably a tree, was planned just to the right of the dog on the far left, but was not executed.
Anna Krekeler, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 29 September 1998
infrared photography: A. Krekeler, RMA, 19 November 2008
paint samples: A. Krekeler, RMA, nos. SK-A-2676/1-2, 19 November 2008
technical report: A. Krekeler, RMA, 19 November 2008

Condition

Fair. The paint surface has moated impasto due to the heavy wax-resin lining. There are discoloured retouchings in the sky. The thick varnish has significantly yellowed. It has an uneven gloss and saturates poorly.

Conservation

H.H. Mertens, 1966: complete restoration; canvas lined
H. Plagge, 1966: complete restoration; canvas lined

Provenance

…; collection Baron Rudolph Theodorus van Pallandt van Eerde (1868-1913), Huis Eerde, Ambt-Ommen, by 1912;¹ by whom bequeathed to the museum, with 9 other paintings and 46 prints, July 1913²

Object number: SK-A-2676

Credit line: R.T., Baron van Pallandt van Eerde Bequest

The artist

Adriaen Cornelisz Beeldemaker (? Rotterdam 1618 - The Hague 1709)

Adriaen Cornelisz Beeldemaker may be the same person as the Arie who was baptized in Rotterdam on 15 July 1618 as the son of Cornelis Cornelisz Hagener and Adriaentje Arens. He probably adopted the surname Beeldemaker (picture maker) at an early date in reference to his profession. In 1649 he became betrothed in Rotterdam to Maria or Margaretha van der Merck from ’s-Gravendeel, a village south-west of Dordrecht. Her father was the fine art painter Jacob van der Merck, who was living in Leiden at the time. Beeldemaker then moved there himself and registered with the Guild of St Luke in 1650. The following year he left the city for an unknown destination, but had returned by 1654-55. The couple subsequently settled in Dordrecht, where Maria gave birth to a daughter in 1657. Their son François, born in 1659, would also become a painter. Beeldemaker was widowed in 1662, and three years later he married Sara Tegelbergh in Oudewater, near Gouda. He moved back to Leiden, where he is recorded as paying his guild membership dues in 1665-68 and 1673-75 and rented a house on Rapenburg. His son Cornelis was born in 1671, and he too followed in his father’s footsteps.

In 1676 Beeldemaker was living at Maliebaan in The Hague and took out a three-year lease on a garden in the same street where he and the owner built a summer house, in which he painted ‘some perspectives’. He acquired his burgess rights in 1677. More than three decades later he died in that city; his funeral tax was paid on 19 February 1709.

Beeldemaker made his name chiefly as an animal painter, above all of dogs. He was also a portraitist, and received several major commissions, including one in 1672 for a picture of the dean and wardens of the Leiden drapers’ guild.³ In that genre, though, he was no more than mediocre. His earliest dated work is a 1644 likeness of an unknown man,⁴ and his last one, Landscape with Two Hunters Pestering a Sleeping Milkmaid, is from 1701.⁵

Richard Harmanni, 2022

References

J. van Gool, De nieuwe Schouburg der Nederlantsche kunstschilders en schilderessen: Waer in de levens- en kunstbedryven er tans levende en reets overleedene schilders, die van Houbraken, noch eenig ander schryver, zyn aengeteekend, verhaelt worden, I, The Hague 1750, pp. 63-64 (as Johannes Beeldemaker); F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis: Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers [enz.], IV, Rotterdam 1881-82, pp. 110, 159; ibid., V, 1882-83, pp. 48, 212; Bredius in A. Bredius and C. Hofstede de Groot, Musée Royal de La Haye (Mauritshuis): Catalogue raisonné des tableaux et des sculptures, coll. cat. The Hague 1895, p. 16; G.H. Veth, ‘Aantekeningen omtrent eenige Dordrechtsche schilder: Aanvullingen en verbeteringen’, Oud Holland 21 (1903), pp. 111-24, esp. pp. 111-12; Haverkorn van Rijsewijk in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, III, Leipzig 1909, pp. 164-65; Nederland’s Patriciaat 16 (1926), p. 12; Wijnman in P.C. Molhuysen et al. (eds.), Nieuw Nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek, IX, Leiden 1933, cols. 44-45; Römer in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, VIII, Munich/Leipzig 1994, p. 236; Van der Zeeuw in N.I. Schadee (ed.), Rotterdamse meesters uit de Gouden Eeuw, exh. cat. Rotterdam (Historisch Museum) 1994, pp. 270-71; Bredius notes, RKD

Entry

The subject of a hunter with a few dogs is one that Adriaen Beeldemaker depicted on many occasions. There are three greyhounds in this painting, as there are in his 1653 Hunter in the Rijksmuseum,⁶ while the other four are probably Brittany spaniels. The date is not fully legible, but the third digit is definitely a nine. The final one could be ‘6’ or ‘9’, so this is anyway a late work by the artist, since he died in 1709 and his last dated picture is from 1701.⁷

Although Beeldemaker is regarded as a specialist painter of dogs, and of hunting hounds in particular, his rendition of them is variable in quality, as is his output in general. Here they are relatively lively but the human figure was not his strongest suit, as his portraits show.

The four dogs in the central foreground and the other three behind them are situated on a hillock. The tree on the left helps to give the vista a sense of great depth. The valley has an Italianate look with the buildings bathing in sunlight. Rarely did Beeldemaker make a landscape background as easily legible and attractive as this one. He usually made do with a few vague indications, as in a scene of 1695 with two hunters and a pack of hounds.⁸ That picture bears some relation to the one in the Rijksmuseum in its composition and subject. The foreground vegetation is also highly differentiated. Given the late date of execution and the fact that the standard of Beeldemaker’s work deteriorated badly after 1695, this canvas can still be counted as one of his better paintings, and for that reason the last digit of the date is more like to be a six than a nine.

Richard Harmanni, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Collection catalogues

1914, p. 529, no. 408a; 1976, p. 105, no. A 2676

Citation

Richard Harmanni, 2022, 'Adriaen Cornelisz Beeldemaker, Hunter with Hounds at the Edge of a Wood, c. 1696', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5954

(accessed 14 November 2024 16:59:26).