Returning from the Hunt

Returning from the Hunt of around 1670, also in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, represents Teniers's later engagement with hunting subjects, the format matured and confident after decades of practice. The return from the hunt — riders and dogs coming back, game displayed or carried — was a pendant subject to the resting hunters: if one showed the pause within the activity, the other showed its completion. Teniers by the 1670s was past sixty and increasingly represented his subjects with a slightly cooler, more distanced observation than the warm intimacy of his earlier peasant and soldier scenes. Hunting subjects continued to find ready aristocratic patrons, and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp's possession of multiple Teniers hunting works reflects the concentration of his Flemish heritage in the city where his career was spent.

Panel with a palette somewhat cooled from the warm amber tones of Teniers's earlier work. The return journey provides a different compositional structure from the hunt itself — figures arranged in a procession or loose group moving from background to foreground, the receding landscape giving way to the welcoming estate or village. Game carried or displayed becomes a still-life element within the genre composition, each animal or bird treated with the textural attention Teniers brought to all his animal subjects.