Game Still-Life with Statue of Diana

Jan Weenix was the son of Jan Baptist Weenix and the greatest Dutch hunting still life painter of the early eighteenth century, continuing the specialty in dead game, hunting paraphernalia, and park landscapes that his father had pioneered. His Game Still Life with Statue of Diana from 1709 combines the standard hunting trophy — dead stag or hare, hunting dogs, fowling pieces — with a Diana statue that provides both decorative and thematic coherence, the goddess of the hunt presiding over her domain's spoils. Such paintings were produced for aristocratic hunting lodges and the great halls of country houses across Northern Europe.

Weenix organizes the dead game animals and hunting accessories against a park landscape backdrop, with the Diana statue providing vertical compositional structure. His rendering of the varied textures of fur, feather, stone, and metal is technically extraordinary, combining the precision of still life with the spatial ambition of landscape.