Today is the last Sunday before the hunting ban comes into operation, so this week’s picture is The Huntsmen Halted, by the Dutch seventeenth-century painter Aelbert Cuyp. The work was probably painted in the early 1650s and may be seen at the Barber Institute in Birmingham.

 

Cuyp is now widely regarded as one of the finest artists of the so-called “Golden Age” of Dutch painting, although his work remained comparatively little known and appreciated during his lifetime, and indeed for a century or more after his death. He was born and raised in the town of Dordrecht, painting exclusively for his patrons in that city, where the picture trade was relatively insular. His works were slow to appear on the international art market and it was only during the late eighteenth century, when British aristocratic collectors began to collect his pictures in quantity, that he was elevated to the rank of Old Master. The milords of the Georgian period admired the way in which the artist suffused his landscapes with a golden glow, dubbing him “the Dutch Claude” (an allusion to the great French seventeenth-century landscape painter, whose work, filtered through earlier Dutch imitators such as Jan Both, was certainly an influence on Cuyp). They had a particular soft spot, keen huntsmen that they were, for his many depictions of equestrian and hunting themes.


In 1769, the publisher and entrepreneur John Boydell put the seal on Cuyp’s modern reputation by including his work in a lavish volume of prints etched after Old Master paintings. The anonymous author of that book’s commentary proudly trumpeted the part played by his fellow-countrymen in alerting the wider world to Cuyp’s genius: “It is astonishing that the works of so great a master … should have been almost totally unknown, or...

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