Hunting grounds for painters

Abstract

This article focuses on the intersection of the hunt and art as it is reflected in three early modern depictions of artists as successful hunters: Gabriel Metsu’s Hunter getting dressed after bathing, Ary de Vois’s Self-portrait as a hunter, and Rembrandt’s A dead bittern held high by a hunter. These three self-referential paintings show different ways in which the hunt and dead animals were used to characterise artistic practice, and to what extent they were underpinned by the semantics of other forms of ‘the chase’: the pursuit of love, knowledge, and power.