Still Life with Goose and Game before a Country Estate, c. 1685

This imposing game piece features the lifeless bodies of a large white goose and a reddish-brown hare arrayed with an almost aristocratic elegance in the left foreground of an expansive formal garden.[1]  [1]
I would like to thank Anke van Wagenberg and Afiena van Zanten for their research on this painting. In addition to being larger than other pictorial elements, the goose and the hare are also more brilliantly illuminated and rendered with extraordinary care and sensitivity.[2]  [2]
I would like to thank Gary Graves, research scientist and curator in the Department of Vertebrate Zoology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, for identifying the animals in this painting (correspondence, April 6, 2005, in National Gallery of Art curatorial files). Indeed, the goose’s downy feathers and the hare’s soft fur seem so real that one could imagine their supple forms yielding to the touch.[3]  [3]
In 1774 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) saw the wall decorations that Weenix painted between 1710 and 1714 for the Elector Palatine Johann Wilhelm von der Pflaz of Düsseldorf and described his impressions as follows: “What enchanted me there beyond measure were the wall decorations by Weenix. All animals that hunting can procure were lying there, well ordered, as on the dais of a large columnar hall; above them one looked into a vast landscape. To reanimate these inanimate creatures, this extraordinary man had marshaled his whole talent, and in rendering the greatest variety of animal textures: bristles, hair, feathers, antlers, claws, he had equaled and, with regard to effect, surpassed nature.” This text is quoted from Scott A. Sullivan, The Dutch Gamepiece (Montclair, NJ, 1984), 65. Weenix extended the sweeping flow of their large bodies across the foreground and enlivened the scene with a confrontational exchange between a dove and a small dog (a papillon). The dove, standing before the dead game, has sharply turned its head and thrown back its wings in defiant response to the dog’s sudden intrusion (and barking?), while the dog reacts defensively to the dove’s angry posture. As though startled by the sudden commotion below, another dove flies aloft in the evening sky.

Jan Weenix learned the art of painting game pieces in the 1650s and 1660s in the studio of his father, Jan Baptist Weenix (1621–1660/1661).[4]  [4]
Jan Weenix’s early works are primarily genre scenes in Italianate settings that follow his father’s model. See Christine Schloss, “The Early Italianate Genre Paintings by Jan Weenix (ca. 1642–1719),” Oud-Holland 97 (1983): 69–97. Following a Flemish tradition established by Frans Snyders (Flemish, 1579 - 1657), Weenix’s father generally situated his game pieces, including the large Still Life with a Dead Swan in Detroit [fig. 1]   [fig. 1] Jan Baptist Weenix, Still Life with a Dead Swan, c. 1650, oil on canvas, Detroit Institute of Arts, Gift of Ralph Harman Booth. Photo: The Bridgeman Art Library, in interior settings, often animating his scenes with narrative elements such as snarling cats and dogs.[5]  [5]
See Alan Chong and Wouter Kloek, Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands 1550–1720 (Amsterdam, 1999), 198–200, no. 41. The narrative element in the Detroit painting is lacking since it has been trimmed at the left and bottom. It is, however, evident in the painting’s probable pendant, Dead Roebock, c. 1650, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (see Chong and Kloek, fig. 41b). Chong and Kloek also illustrate one of Jan Baptist Weenix’s outdoor game pieces, Landscape with a Huntsman Cutting up a Dead Deer, c. 1650 (National Gallery, London), fig. 41a. When Jan Weenix moved to Amsterdam in the late 1670s, he developed a new genre of game piece that features dead game gracefully arrayed before formal outdoor gardens.

The National Gallery of Art’s work is neither signed nor dated, but Weenix probably painted it in the mid-1680s. The general disposition of dead game in the foreground of a formal garden, the delicacy of touch in rendering the fur, and even the position of the hare’s upper body (in reverse) are comparable to Weenix’s Still Life with a Dead Hare, 1682 (or 1683), in Karlsruhe [fig. 2]   [fig. 2] Jan Weenix, Still Life with a Dead Hare, 1682 (or 1683), oil on canvas, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe . Photo © Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe 2010. Photo: W. Pankoke. By the 1690s Weenix’s style had changed noticeably: his compositions became more complex, the poses of the animals more mannered, his modeling slicker, and his touch somewhat harder.

Weenix painted his game pieces at a time when wealthy Dutch burghers were building country houses with formal gardens outside of urban centers, such as those along the river Vecht.[6]  [6]
Erik de Jong, “‘Netherlandish Hesperides’: Garden Art in the Period of William and Mary, 1650–1702,” in "The Anglo-Dutch Garden in the Age of William and Mary," ed. John Dixon Hunt and Erik de Jong, special issue, Journal of Garden History 8, nos. 2–3 (April–September 1988): 15–40, provides an excellent overview of the appeal of country houses for Dutch aristocracy in the latter half of the seventeenth century.   Many of his patrons came from Amsterdam and Utrecht, near the manor house Huis ter Mey where the artist used to live with his father.[7]  [7]
Jan Weenix purchased this manor house in Vleuten, just outside of Utrecht, in 1657. As is reflected in Still Life with Goose and Game before a Country Estate, French architectural and garden designs were greatly admired in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and their influence is seen in the country homes and richly decorated gardens constructed by the Dutch in that period.[8]  [8]
The garden of the Clingendael estate near The Hague was particularly important for incorporating French formal garden designs into Dutch traditions. This garden was constructed in the 1670s and 1680s by the owner of the estate, Philips Doublet, who was married to Susanna Huygens, Constantijn Huygens’ daughter. Doublet traveled regularly to France to study gardens with his brother-in-law, Christiaan Huygens, who worked in Paris. Huygens provided Doublet with prints after French gardens, which he used when designing his own gardens. Prince William III, impressed by Doublet’s knowledge and abilities, employed Doublet to supervise changes in the garden at Huis ten Bosch. For more information about the Clingendael estate, see “The Anglo-Dutch Garden in the Age of William and Mary,” ed. John Dixon Hunt and Erik de Jong, special issue, Journal of Garden History 8, nos. 2–3 (April–September 1988): 180–184. Sumptuous villas with elegant gardens containing sculptures, reflecting pools, follies, and trellises were precisely the types of estates that called for Weenix’s game pieces, although many of these paintings were also commissioned for the owners’ urban homes.[9]  [9]
See Remmet van Luttervelt, De buitenplaatsen aan de Vecht (Lochem, 1970). Although it is not known for whom Weenix painted the Gallery’s work, the Amsterdam merchant Gerret Braamcamp, whose internationally renowned collection included numerous masterpieces of Dutch art, acquired it in the middle of the eighteenth century.[10]  [10]
The fame of the artist and the quality of the painting are stressed in M. de Bastide, Le temple des arts ou le cabinet de M. Braamcamp (Amsterdam, 1766), 88: “Ce Tableau est peint avec cet art que possédoit, comme on le sait, ce grant Artiste, dont le mérit est trop connu en ce genre de représentation, pour en parler ici.” Subsequently, it was bought by John Hope, in whose family it remained for five generations (see Provenance).

Prince William III (1650–1702) was passionate about both hunting and gardening at his estates in Dieren, Soestdijk, and Apeldoorn, and an admirer of French fashion and garden design, inspiring a number of his courtiers to follow suit during the 1670s and 1680s.[11]  [11]
For Prince William III and the hunt, see Scott A. Sullivan, The Dutch Gamepiece (Montclair, NJ, 1984), 35–39. Nevertheless, as Scott Sullivan has convincingly argued, most of Weenix’s Dutch patrons were not aristocrats—of which there were few in the Dutch Republic—but rather wealthy burghers, who were actually prohibited from hunting game such as wild geese, ducks, and swans.[12]  [12]
Scott A. Sullivan, The Dutch Gamepiece (Montclair, NJ, 1984), 34. Indeed, no guns, nets, or other hunting paraphernalia, other than a knife made from a deer antler, are depicted in Still Life with Goose and Game before a Country Estate. Such paintings, whether displayed in country houses or urban dwellings, allowed burghers to associate themselves with an aristocratic lifestyle and to enhance their own social prestige.[13]  [13]
Scott A. Sullivan, The Dutch Gamepiece (Montclair, NJ, 1984), 40.
As Sullivan has stressed, these works were not “mementos of the aristocratic hunter’s catch.”[14]  [14]
Scott A. Sullivan, “Jan Baptist Weenix: Still Life with a Dead Swan,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 57, no. 2 (1979): 69.

Little is known about Weenix’s painting techniques and working procedures. Judging from his accurate depictions of animals, which have allowed zoologists to identify specific species, he must have carefully studied their anatomy and the appearance of their fur and feathers. Because identical animals appear in different paintings—the papillon in the Gallery’s painting, for example, is also seen at the far right of Weenix’s portrait of Agnes Block and her family [fig. 3]   [fig. 3] Jan Weenix, Agnes Block, Sybrande de Flines and Children in their Garden at Vijverhof along the Vecht, c. 1694, oil on canvas, Amsterdams Historisch Museum—it is probable that he based his images of animals on drawings or oil sketches made from life.[15]  [15]
See, for example, Weenix’s oil sketch of A Squirrel Monkey, c. 1700 (oil on canvas, 29.9 x 25.9 cm [11 3/4 x 10 ¼ in.]), which was with the art dealer Jean-Luc Baroni, London, in 2010–2011. Like Melchior d’Hondecoeter (1636–1695), another master of the game piece genre during this period, Weenix seemingly worked, at least in part, from stuffed birds and animals, which would have enabled him to depict them from different angles.[16]  [16]
Marrigje Rikken, Melchior d’Hondecoeter, Bird Painter, trans. Michael Hoyle (Amsterdam, 2008), 51. The angry dove, with wings outspread, for example, appears from different points of view in other of Weenix’s paintings.[17]  [17]
See Weenix’s A Monkey and a Dog beside Dead Game and Fruits, with the Estate of Rijksdorp near Wassenaer in the Background, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (no. A 462), in which both the standing and the flying dove appear in different orientations. Although Weenix occasionally represented actual garden settings, as in the background of his portrait of Agnes Block and her family, most of the gardens he depicted were imaginary.[18]  [18]
Agnes Block (1629–1704) was a renowned cultivator of plants at her estate on the river Vecht, Vijverhof. For further information about Agnes Block, see “The Anglo-Dutch Garden in the Age of William and Mary,” ed. John Dixon Hunt and Erik de Jong, special issue, Journal of Garden History 8, nos. 2–3 (April–September 1988): 121–122. He probably based many of the sculpted urns, plinths, fountains, and trellises in his paintings on prints of French and Italian gardens and garden ornaments, which were readily available in the Dutch Republic at that time.[19]  [19]
In his early genre scenes Weenix occasionally incorporated Italian sculptures that he found either in his father’s paintings or in prints; see Christine Schloss, “The Early Italianate Genre Paintings by Jan Weenix (ca. 1642–1719),” Oud-Holland 97 (1983): 76–77. Specific borrowings from prints of garden designs or garden sculpture, however, have yet to be identified in his later game pieces. For the type of French prints that Weenix could have seen, see “The Anglo-Dutch Garden in the Age of William and Mary,” ed. John Dixon Hunt and Erik de Jong, special issue, Journal of Garden History 8, nos. 2–3 (April–September 1988).

Weenix generally based the sculptural imagery in his game pieces on classical prototypes. The Gallery’s painting, however, is unusual, if not unique, in that the relief sculpture on the large foreground plinth depicts the Holy Family. The sunlit portion of the relief reveals Mary and Joseph gazing down in quiet reverence at the Christ Child lying before them in deep shadow. The style and character of these figures owe much to Abraham Bloemaert (Dutch, 1566 - 1651), an artist whose work Weenix would have known from his years in Utrecht (Bloemaert was also his father’s master).[20]  [20]
As Jaap Bolten has noted in correspondence to Afiena van Zanten (August 6, 2007), no exact prototype from Bloemaert is known, but the style and disposition of the figures in the Holy Family are entirely in the manner of this Utrecht master. Weenix intended this game piece to express Christian ideas about death and resurrection, as is evident from the disposition of the Holy Family on the relief sculpture, the pattern of light and dark falling across the figures, and the emblematic associations of the flowers growing in front of the plinth: drooping yellow calendula, known as the “death flower” (dodenbloem) in Dutch, and roses, which symbolize the sorrows of the Virgin. In this context, the dove flying away from the dead goose is not just a narrative element enlivening the scene, but an essential iconographic motif symbolizing the Christian belief in the immortality of the soul.

Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.

April 24, 2014