Hunting Still Life in a Forest

Hunting Still Life in a Forest

Wybrand Hendriks

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This richly saturated watercolor displays the trophies of a recent hunt, which were acquired using the rifle in the left corner with a duck slung dramatically over it. Firearms were first used in hunting parties during the sixteenth century, and by the eighteenth there were many more types with greatly improved accuracy. The pile of game, which includes a hare and a heron, is framed by a statue of a figure on a plinth on what appears to be the end of a border wall. The statue, wall, and hunting trophies, though congruent with the lush landscape, are powerful symbols of humanity’s dominance over nature, a popular theme in Dutch eighteenth-century still lives.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.