(Antwerp 1586 – before 1656)
Hunters in a wooded winter landscape,
oil on panel laid down on panel, original panel fragments attached to the reverse with the mark of the City of Antwerp and the panel maker’s mark of Lambert Steens (active 1608–1632), 74 x 105 cm, framed

Provenance:
Aristocratic collection, Belgium

A similar landscape composition with woodcutters, dated after 1617 (oil on panel, 76.5 x 112 cm) is conserved in the Mauritshuis, The Hague.

The present scene of a snow-bound day’s sport amidst the grounds of a country estate, with leading lines of bare, serpentine trees and a panoply of figures swaddled against the cold, is a fine example of the oeuvre of the Meester van de Winterlandschappen or ‘Master of the Winter Landscapes’. This celebrated landscapist who was hitherto recognised only by the fine characteristics of his hand common to many of his works, was identified as Gijsbrecht Leytens by P. F. J. J. Reelick in the 1940s.

A typical feature of Leytens’s paintings is the use of light to create a hazy atmosphere, modelled though blue and grey skies. In the case of the present painting however, the presence of a winter sun is conveyed by the luminescence of the clouds above and snow below. The tempietto compliments the fashionably dressed crouching gentleman holding a fowling piece in the foreground. Seventeenth-century inventories record that the staffage in his compositions was frequently painted by his collaborators, chief among them Frans Francken II and Sebastian Vrancx.

Leytens, who trained in the workshop of Jacques Vrolyck and was admitted to the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1611, belonged to the generation of winter landscapists that came after the originators of the genre, such as Pieter Brueghel I and Abel Grimmer. Leytens’s narrative innovation came from relying less on the figural groups in his compositions to add drama, but rather on shimmering wintry light illuminating dynamic skies and tree-lines, a true ‘poet of the frost’, as scholars have also called him.