Jan Wildens, Landscape with the Hunt of Meleager and Atalanta

by Atelier Liesjes

A dark forest, painted in brown and golden-green, surrounds a hunting party. In the bottom left, dogs are pouncing on a wild boar; a hunter in a red tunic raises his spear, a naked woman with a bow stands beside him, and behind them more figures are crowding in. In the centre, a horseman on a grey horse, clad in armour and wearing a red cloak, watches the hunt. On the right, a second horseman gallops through the undergrowth on a light-coloured horse, followed by dogs. In the centre of the picture, a pool of water opens up, with reeds and a low waterfall; beyond it lies a valley with meadows and a wooded hill, on which a castle can be seen on the left. Above the treetops, a narrow strip of sky remains, pale and warm. The subject is mythological: the hunt of Meleager and Atalanta, in which the young hero and the huntress pursue the Calydonian boar. Wildens depicts the myth not as a drama but as an event set within a landscape; the trees, the water and the light are given greater prominence than the figures. The tone is sombre and warm, with deep shadows and an almost deathly silence in the distance, where the valley dissolves into a mist of brown and grey. The paint is applied thinly and kept dark; the section on the left near the boar is barely worked out and dissolves into brown and black. Jan Wildens (Antwerp 1586 – Antwerp 1653) was an Antwerp landscape painter who worked closely with Rubens and painted the landscapes in his history pieces. He became a master of the Guild of Saint Luke in 1604 and continued to work in Antwerp throughout his life. His landscapes were praised by his contemporaries for their sense of space. A dark, narrative work for a classical interior.