Diana at the Chase

Diana at the Chase from around 1812 by Augustus Wall Callcott is a mythological landscape depicting the goddess of the hunt in a woodland setting. The hunting Diana allowed Callcott to combine landscape painting with the classical figure tradition, giving his atmospheric woodland subject the additional prestige of antique narrative. Such mythological landscapes occupied a respected position in the hierarchy of genres, elevating landscape above the merely topographic or picturesque by infusing it with literary and historical significance. Callcott's oil technique drew on Dutch marine and landscape traditions to produce silvery atmospheric effects combined with the romantic breadth fashionable in early nineteenth-century British painting. The Bury Art Museum holds this work as part of its collection of British Romantic landscape.

The woodland setting frames the mythological figure, with the landscape rendered in Callcott's atmospheric manner while the figure adds classical narrative content.