David Vinckboons

Private collection, Switzerland.

This painting depicting a fashionably attired hunting party resting in a forest is a precursor to the buitenpartij (outdoor elegant company), a popular genre of Dutch painting of which Vinckboons was one of the earliest and most influential proponents.  Later, more elaborate outdoor companies are typically set in formal palace gardens, but here the gathering has not yet migrated out of the densely wooded forest setting that Gillis van Coninxloo and Vinckboons developed in the years just before 1600.

Vinckboons used a nearly identical setting, with a dense forest interior parted at the center to reveal a riverside village, in five other paintings including the painting sold in these Rooms on 31 January 2013, lot 106 (formerly collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art).  All of these forest interiors are dated to the first decade of the 17^th century.  The figural grouping in the present painting is found in another work by Vinckboons in the Muzeum Nardowe, Warsaw (Inv. M.Ob.834).