Beskrivning: Se även beskrivning i den engelska versionen

Catalogue raisonné: Description in Flemish paintings C. 1600-C. 1800 III, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, 2010, cat.no. 191:
 
Technical notes: The painting’s fabric support has
been lined and mounted on a non-original stretcher. A
thick ground hides the underlying weave structure of the
support.
Paint was applied thickly, wet-into-wet, the brush
strokes in the dogs’ coats smoothly blended, with rich
impastos in the whites.
The painting is generally in rather poor condition. A
thick layer of heavily discoloured old varnish is present.
A pronounced overall craquelure is visible. There are
localized areas of abrasion along the weave structure of
the fabric support, for example, just above the back of the
dog lying on its side in the left foreground. Coarse
retouching at the upper left corner, along the lower left
and, especially, the right edges, covers abrasion and
extensive losses of the paint and ground layers; scattered
minor retouches are visible in the sky and landscape (tree
on the right).

Provenance: Carl Edvard Ekman, Finspång 1886; Axel
Ekman, Mo gård, Mariestad. Purchased in 1990 from
Louis de Geer, Sunnanå säteri, Brunna

Bibliography: Granberg 1886, no. 179 (as Paul de
Vos); Göthe 1894, no. 98 (as Paul de Vos); Granberg
1911–1913, III, p. 7 no. 20 (as Paul de Vos); Granberg
1929–1931, III, p. 72

A bear standing upright, encircled and attacked by five
hunting dogs, has seized one dog with its powerful
paws and tramples another underfoot, while a third
bites its hind leg. The scene is set in the foreground of
an open landscape with hills in the distance.
Granberg (1886), followed by Göthe (1894), attributed
the painting to the Antwerp animal painter Paul
de Vos, a follower of his older brother-in-law Frans
Snyders. The composition of Leufsta 31 is in fact
related to a Bear Hunt by Snyders formerly at Österby
bruk, Sweden, and, especially, to the variant version in
Segovia (Palacio Real de Riofrío), each depicting a different
grouping of hunting dogs.1 The dog breeds in
the present painting are also easily recognizable from
paintings by Snyders, especially the sleeker, more
attenuated dogs of the artist’s later hunting scenes,
although here they are very feebly painted and lack the
anatomical articulation and convincing psychological
expression of animals in works by the master and
artists in his immediate circle. The frequently copied
pathetic motif of the yelping bitch lying on its side in
the left foreground, its head lifted back and its belly
exposed – a pose derived from paintings by Rubens
and ultimately from the ancient Roman she-wolf 2 –
occurs similarly in Snyders’ Boar Hunts of c.
1620–1630 at Poznan (Museum Narodowe) and
Antwerp (Rockoxhuis).3
A companion piece to no. 192.
CF

1 See Robels 1989, cat. nos. 250 and 250a, illus.; and Díaz Padrón 1995, II,
p. 1284, illus.
2 For a discussion of this motif, see Balis 1986, pp. 78–79, and nn. 57, 58.
Balis has shown that this motif was actually invented by Peter Paul
Rubens, who used it for his Boar Hunt at Marseilles (Musée des Beaux-
Arts) and Landscape with a Boar Hunt of c. 1615–1620 at Dresden
(Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie).
3 See Robels 1989, cat.nos. 223 I, 223 II, illus. The Poznan painting was
engraved by J. Zaal around 1670, see Rooses 1879, repr. opp. p. 398. A
drawing of two injured dogs, the yelping bitch and a dog lying on its back,
formerly in a Belgian private collection, is a copy after Zaal’s print, see
Robels 1989, cat. no. AZ 73. Apparently Snyders first employed the motif
(the animal is a dog and not a bitch) in a Boar Hunt at Dresden (Staatliche
Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. 1196), executed jointly with
Anthony van Dyck around 1620, and subsequently repeated it frequently,
cf. Robels 1989, cat.nos. 308 I, 308 II, illus [End]

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