Various animals. Plate 6: A hunter with his hounds

Pieter van Laer (1599-1642) was a Dutch painter, active for much of his career (1625-39) in Rome. There he was nicknamed "Il Bamboccio" (Little clumsy one) on account of his physical disability. According to Joachim van Sandrart, he had long legs, a short trunk and no neck. He was one of the leaders of a fraternal organisation set up by Netherlandish artists in Rome to protect their interests.

Van Laer was the first artist to specialise in scenes of street life in Rome. His robustly realistic, 'salt of the earth' indeed anti-academic style proved popular with collectors and he inspired numerous followers who were known as the "Bamboccianti". They were mainly other Northen Europeans working in Rome. Their pictures are called "bambocciata", Italian for childishness, not complimentary but like Cubism, the name stuck. In 1639 van Laer returned to his native Haarlem. He died young - according to the leading early historian of Dutch artist, Houbraken, he suffered from depression and committed suicide.

This etching is plate 6 of the series of 8, Various Animals. An endearing slice of life (especially for dog lovers), it shows a hunter holding a staff, bending to pat one of his seven dogs with his right hand. Two dogs are sleeping on the lower left, and so is a cat, presumably on good terms with the hounds, who sits on a window-sill of a decrepit building on the upper right.

See: Web Gallery of Art, 'Laer, Pieter van', https://www.wga.hu/bio_m/l/laer/biograph.html

Dr Mark Stocker  Curator, Historical International Art     April 2019