A Bird Hunter on a Riverbank

The support is a single horizontally grained oak panel bevelled on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1611. The panel could have been ready for use by 1622, but a date in or after 1628 is more likely. The ground is an off-white colour. The paint layers were built up from the back to the front, the figure of the bird hunter being reserved in the background.

Good. The panel is somewhat damaged and irregular along the right and top edges.

...; sale, Henrik Jan Antony Raedt van Oldenbarnevelt (1828-1903, The Hague), Amsterdam (F. Muller), 15 April 1902 sqq., no. 2, fl. 330, to Valck, for the museum

ObjectNumber: SK-A-1969

This is one of the smallest and most delicate works in Arentsz’s relatively small oeuvre of a few dozen paintings. Typical features of his paintings are the low vantage point, the low horizon and the stocky figures. The latter recur in different combinations in his oeuvre, so he probably worked from a collection of drawn figure studies.

As in other paintings by Arentsz, the foreground here has been painted fairly broadly in quite dark, saturated colours. The treatment of the river landscape behind it, executed with a fine brush in blue-white transparent tints, resembles a watercolour. The way in which the green reeds are indicated with a series of parallel lines is characteristic of the artist, as are the sparing use of white highlights in the vegetation and figures, and the comma-shaped brown brushstrokes in the foreground.

Given the lack of dated paintings in Arentsz’s oeuvre and of a clear stylistic development within it, one has to rely on dendrochronological examination for an approximate date for this and other paintings by the artist. This particular work was probably executed in the second half of the 1620s.³³See also the entries on SK-A-1448 and SK-A-4033. Peter Klein kindly informed me that the same applies to the River Landscape with Boats and Fishermen in the National Museum, Stockholm; illustrated in coll. cat. Stockholm 2005, p. 54.

The hunter, who is about to shoot a heron, is on the bank of a wide river with sailing boats and fishermen. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to pinpoint the location from the spires and windmills, although one suspects that it is somewhere near Amsterdam. The rather long target gun was used for hunting in the 17th century.⁴⁴See Puype 1996, vol. 1, pt. 1, pp. 93-121.

There is a duck hunter in a similar pose in Arent Arentsz’s Winter Landscape with Duck Hunter,⁵⁵London, Harold Samuel collection, panel, 32 x 58.5 cm; coll. cat. Samuel 1992, no. 2, pp. 15-16 (ill.). which in turn is an almost literal repetition of a painting by Hendrick Avercamp.⁶⁶Welcker 1979, p. 205, no. S 14.2; illustrated in coll. cat. Samuel 1992, p. 15. For a variant of Arentsz’s version see sale, London (Christie’s), 11 December 1992, no. 92 (ill.). The hunter in the Rijksmuseum picture dominates the scene more markedly than in those winter landscapes due to his position parallel to the picture plane. It is likely that this or a similar painting is identical with ‘a piece, being a shooting of a bird’ by Arent Arentsz listed in 1635 in the estate inventory of Arent Pietersz Brughman.⁷⁷De Roever 1889, p. 30: ‘(...) een stuck zijnde een vogelschieterij’.

Jan Piet Filedt Kok, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 3.

Poensgen 1923-24, pp. 117-19

1903, p. 33, no. 375; 1934, p. 31, no. 375; 1960, p. 22, no. 375; 1976, p. 87, no. A 1969; 2007, no. 3

J.P. Filedt Kok, 2007, 'Arent Arentsz., A Bird Hunter on a Riverbank, c. 1625 - c. 1630', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5812