A Lioness Attacking a Wild Boar
Artist/Maker
Material / Technique
Dimensionsh x w: Mått 171 x 200 cm h x w: Ram 164 x 216 cm
Inventory numberNMVst 47
Other titlesTitle (sv): Strid mellan lejon och vildsvin Title (en): A Lioness Attacking a Wild Boar
DescriptionCatalogue raisonné: Description in Flemish paintings C. 1600-C. 1800 III, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, 2010, cat.no. 186: Technical notes: The painting’s support consists of two strips of medium-weight, plain weave fabric, joined together with a vertical seam near centre. The original fabric support has been lined and is mounted on a nonoriginal stretcher. On the recto, an inscription in white paint, “2269” (lower left corner). The preparatory layers consist of a white ground, which hides the weave structure of the fabric support, followed by cool grey imprimatura. Paint is applied quite thickly, especially in the animals and in the sky and clouds, with impastos in the white and yellow highlights. The lion’s pelt is built up using vigorous but controlled, alternating long and short strokes of pastose brown and yellow ochre paint, partly scumbled over the grey imprimatura. Few pentimenti are visible to the naked eye, mainly in the form of contour adjustments, for example, in the lion’s tail and right hind leg. The painting is generally in good condition. A layer of slightly discoloured old varnish is present, with a fine overall craquelure. The paint layers are heavily abraded; the surface is encrusted with dirt, especially in the sky. Scattered discoloured retouches, mainly concentrated in the sky, cover abrasion and losses along the horizontal weave structure of the fabric support. Repaired superficial scratches occur in the paint layers at the lower right (through the lion’s right hind leg). The painting underwent conservation treatment in 1992 and 2010. Provenance: (Sale, Bukowskis, Stockholm, 28 November 1991, lot 74, as “workshop of Frans Snyders, possibly Paul de Vos”); purchased in 1991. Exhibited: Rapps konsthandel, Stockholm, 1952, no. 32 (as Frans Snyders); Stockholm 2010, no. 92. This painting is a variant version of a Snyders composition of c. 1620/1625 now in Munich (Bayerische Gemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek), long assumed to be a pendant to the artist’s Two Young Lions Pursuing a Roebuck in the same collection.1 Both Munich and Vadstena paintings of a lioness mauling a wild boar probably date to the same period, the 1620s. The massive boar is central to both compositions and occupies much of the picture space, although the landscape background is more prominent in the Munich version. While the pose of the lioness is identical in the two pictures, the boar in the present picture is derived from the same model used for the artist’s Bo Hunt of the early 1620s in Poznan (Muzeum Narodowe), 2 in which the hunted beast similarly thrusts its powerful head back to the right, in the direction of its attackers, thus increasing the drama of the confrontation. The Munich paintings have consistently been attributed to Snyders although neither is signed. The present work carries the artist’s authentic signature on the lion’s tail (Fig. 2).3 Executed entirely in Snyders’ characteristic mature style, a certain awkwardness in the rendering of the boar and the landscape, point to workshop participation. Rubens had a determining influence on the development of Snyders’ hunting and animal pictures, and in his seminal study of Rubens’ hunting pictures, Balis stressed Snyders’ dependence on Rubens.4The latter’s influence is certainly felt in Snyders’ Munich pictures: the charging young lion with upraised legs in the sec- ond picture is clearly based on the leaping animal in Rubens’ lost Lion Hunt of 1616/1618 painted for Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria.5 And so it has generally been assumed, though without any visual evidence, that the animal group in the other Munich picture must also be based on an earlier invention by Rubens. Indeed, the pose of the lioness rushing at the boar seems to have been modelled after the central motif of Rubens’ London oil sketch of c. 1615 for a Lion Hunt (The National Gallery), which was then elaborated in the Tiger Hunt at Rennes (Musée des Beaux-Arts) and the Lion Hunt at Dresden (Gemäldegalerie). Rubens’ lion was no doubt inspired by antique representations, such as a famous marble group of a lion mauling a horse now in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, of which Rubens apparently owned a small-scale bronze model that may also have provided inspiration for Snyders.6 Although compositions and motifs in Snyders’ works often may be traced to Rubens, as Balis points out, Snyders was not a copyist, but an original artist with a distinctive character of his own. Therefore, it seems perhaps more likely that the composition of the Munich and Vadstena pictures as a whole was conceived by Snyders himself. Balis was reminded of Rubens by the expressiveness of the lions’ appearance in the Munich pictures, by their firm muscularity and the impression of organic synthesis in their representation. Certainly the beasts of prey in Munich and Vadstena are painted with a dynamic force not seen previously in Snyders’ work. Beneath the fur and skin of Snyders’ lions, musculature and skeletal structure are clearly seen. The artist here demonstrates such a precise knowledge of a lion’s anatomy that one must assume that he had seen and studied real lions, knowing how they move and what their pelt looks like. Lions being quite common in 16th and 17th-century zoos, he might for instance have studied one at Ghent, where lions were to be seen at the Prinsenhof.7 Like Rubens, Snyders uses anatomical knowledge for expressive purposes, to show strength, endurance and physical anguish. He reveals a masterly understanding of animal psychology, demonstrated by the feelings and passions of the animals he paints with such empathy: the mortal fear of the boar as well as the aggression of the attacking lioness. According to Robels (1989), the theme depicted in the Munich and Vadstena paintings is ultimately related to the tradition of fable illustrations. In her view, the unusual hunting motif is ultimately derived from Aesop’s Fable of the Lion and the Wild Boar, in which a laughing vulture awaits the outcome of the struggle between a lion and a boar, an allusion to the blindness of the avid combatants, as illustrated by the Bruges artist Marcus Gheeraerts in Eduard de Dene’s fable book, De warachtighe fabulen der dieren, first published at Bruges in 1567, and reissued in 1617 with commentaries by the Dutch poet Joost van den Vondel.8 Snyders owned two sets of Gheeraerts’ etchings, one of which he bequeathed to his brother-in-law, Paul de Vos, in 1627.9 Indeed, Gheeraerts’ influential fable illustrations formed a veritable treasury of animal imagery ready to be copied, like a bible for the animal painters. Interestingly, the painter Jan van Kessel I copied the group of lion and boar in Snyders’ Vadstena composition for his own small-scale depiction of Aesop’s fable in 1672, reinstating the missing vulture.10 CF 1 Oil on canvas, 162 x 240 cm, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, inv. no. 620; for which see Robels 1989, pp. 92–93, and cat. no. 258, illus.; and Renger 2002, cat. no. 620, illus. Robels lists three replicas and copies of the popular Munich composition (inv. no. 620): a workshop replica, oil on canvas, 156 x 210 cm, sold at Christie’s, London, 4 June 1937, lot 107, which has a different landscape setting, with the group of animals shown next to a tree on the left; and two copies, one sold at London, Sotheby Parke Bernet, 11 June 1980, lot 26, oil on canvas, 135 x 165, the other at Carola van Ham, Kunsthaus am Museum, Cologne, 11–14 June 1980, lot 1234, oil on canvas, 81 x 102. See Robels 1989, cat. no. 258a, 258b, 258c. Balis 1986 mentioned six copies; for which see p. 80 n. 60. A Battle between Lioness and Boar belonging to Count Altamira, and formerly in the collection of the Marquis de Leganés, was sold in London, Stanley, 2 June 1827, lot 65, cf. the 1655 Leganés inventory, for which see Lopéz Navio 1962, p. 273, no. 67. 2 Muzeum Narodowe, inv. no. Mo 91; see Robels 1989, cat. no. 223, illus. 3 Cf. a similar signature on another Snyders painting, The Dead Lion and the Hares of c. 1620/30, Bordeaux, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. no. 7055; see Robels 1989, cat. no. 213, illus. 4 Balis 1986, p. 76ff. 5 Ibid, pp. 80, 128, and cat. no. 6, cf. fig. 51. 6 For the Rubens oil sketch (London, NG, inv. no. 853P) and its sources, see Balis 1986, pp. 79–80, cat. no. 3, fig. 39, cat. no. 7, fig. 57, and cat. no. 8, fig. 63; cf. pp. 133–146, figs. 57–61. For the sculpture group in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome, see Pogány-Balás 1980, figs. 32–39. Many such scenes of fighting animals, a theme derived from the Near East, can be found in Hellenistic art, see further examples in Sturgeon 1975–1976. There is evidence that Rubens had in his possession a small bronze model of the Capitoline group, perhaps a cast from Giambologna’s copy of it, for which see Balis 1986, p. 61. 7 See Balis 1986, p. 71. 8 Cf. the etching by Gheeraerts, Leonis, Apri et Vulturis (pp. 184–185), in Eduard de Dene, Warachtighe Fabulen der Dieren (Bruges 1567). See the facsimile ed. 1978, pp. 134–135. 9 In a testament filed on September 20, 1567, Snyders bequeathed one of his two Aesopic fable books, illustrated by Gheeraerts, to Paul de Vos. See above under no. 184, n. 7. De Vos depicted the fable in a painting now in Madrid (Museo del Prado, inv. no. 1400-T), which is clearly based on the Gheeraerts illustration. See Madrid 1975, I, pp. 431–432, II, pl. 296. 10 Jan van Kessel I, Fable of the Lion and the Boar, oil on copper, 15.6 x 20.6 cm, signed, sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 25May 2000, lot 108; see a photograph on file at the RKD, The Hague. The painting, now in a French private collection, belongs to a set of four fable pictures, dated 1672, painted on small format copper plates.[End]
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