Hunting Scene with Hounds and Tigers

This hunting scene with hounds and tigers from Astley Hall in Chorley represents an unusual exotic variation on Snyders's hunting repertoire. Tigers were known to European painters primarily from menageries maintained by rulers such as the Holy Roman Emperor and the Spanish Habsburgs, where exotic animals from Asia and Africa were kept as symbols of global power. Snyders, like other Flemish animal painters, occasionally depicted exotic species — lions, tigers, leopards, elephants — that he would have encountered in these collections or through drawings and engravings. The pairing of European hunting hounds with an Asian tiger created an artificial combat that could never occur in nature but served a symbolic purpose: demonstrating the range of the natural world's predatory energy. Astley Hall's collection represents the accumulation of a significant English country house over several centuries, and Flemish animal paintings of this type were popular acquisitions for British collectors from the seventeenth century onwards.

The tiger presents Snyders with a different textural challenge from the smooth-coated greyhounds or bristled boars of his standard repertoire. The striped coat requires careful observation of how the orange-and-black pattern follows the body's three-dimensional form, bending around the haunches and shoulders. The hounds are rendered with his standard techniques; the tiger with necessarily more experimental approach.