Wooded Evening Landscape
by WYNANTS, Jan, Oil on canvas, 152 x 191 cm
This large-scale landscape depicts a wooded evening landscape with a hunter and his dogs, another hunter on horseback conversing with a peasant, a fishermen and a falconer carrying a hoop of falcons on a path, a wagon and other figures by a lake beyond.
Throughout his career, Wynants drew inspiration for his landscapes from the dunes near Haarlem, where he was born, and where his early development was influenced by Jacob van Ruisdael and Philips Wouwermans. This painting employs one of the artist’s favourite compositional structures, with the left side of the canvas built up with dunes and trees, and a winding path leading into an open panoramic view at right.
The staffage in Wynants’s paintings was often added by another artist, in this case by his frequent collaborator Adriaen van de Velde.