Artwork
Return from the Falcon Hunt
Return from the Falcon Hunt is an oil painting by the Dutch Golden Age artist Nicolaes Pieterszoon Berchem. It dates from 1670 and is held in the collection of the Gemäldegalerie Berlin.
About this work
Overview
Measuring 75 by 106 centimetres, the work is held in the collection of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, where it remains on public view.
Return from the Falcon Hunt is an oil painting on panel by the Dutch Golden Age artist Nicolaes Pieterszoon Berchem, dated 1670. Measuring 75 by 106 centimetres, the work is held in the collection of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, where it remains on public view. The painting exemplifies Berchem's mature Italianate manner, combining a ruined architectural landscape with elegantly dressed figures and animals to create a pastoral hunting scene that was highly prized by collectors of the period. Its place in Berchem's extensive output, which included numerous paintings, etchings, and drawings, reflects the widespread demand for his idealised rural imagery among seventeenth-century patrons.
Subject & Meaning
The painting depicts the aftermath of a falcon hunt, with mounted figures in plumed hats and colourful garments gathered near massive rocky ruins that dominate the left and centre of the composition. A white horse with a rider draped in red commands attention among darker horses, while a seated woman in a low-cut dress holds an object near a reclining child at the lower centre; sheep rest nearby. Dogs are scattered throughout, and two additional riders move through shallow water toward the right, where small figures appear near distant crumbling structures. The scene carries the allegorical and pastoral overtones characteristic of Berchem's work, blending aristocratic leisure with the romantic decay of classical antiquity. The falcon hunt itself was a noble pursuit, and its depiction alongside ruins and idealised rural life speaks to a constructed vision of Mediterranean romance that appealed to Northern European collectors who had never visited Italy.
Context
Nicolaes Pieterszoon Berchem (1620-1683) was born in Haarlem and died in Amsterdam, producing an immense body of work that Hofstede de Groot estimated at around 850 paintings, though many attributions remain disputed. He was a central figure in the second generation of Dutch Italianate landscape painters, artists who either travelled to Italy or absorbed its romantic imagery through the works of predecessors. His paintings were in great demand, as were his approximately 80 etchings and 500 drawings. Berchem also contributed staffage to works by contemporaries including Allaert van Everdingen, Jan Hackaert, Gerrit Dou, Meindert Hobbema, and Willem Schellinks. Return from the Falcon Hunt represents the commercial and artistic peak of this tradition, where idealised Italianate settings served as backdrops for scenes of aristocratic pleasure that satisfied the tastes of wealthy Dutch patrons.
Legacy
Berchem's landscapes, with their golden dawn light and classical ruins, remained sought after long after his death, establishing a template for pastoral imagery that influenced subsequent generations of European landscape painting. The Return from the Falcon Hunt continues to be reproduced and studied as a characteristic example of his mature style, preserved in one of Germany's major museum collections. Its enduring presence in institutional holdings and commercial image archives testifies to its established place in the canon of Dutch Golden Age painting, even as scholarly attention to Berchem's oeuvre grapples with the substantial problems of attribution that plague his extensive workshop output.
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Artist
Nicolaes Pieterszoon Berchem (1 October 1620 – 18 February 1683) was a highly esteemed and prolific Dutch Golden Age painter of pastoral landscapes, populated with mythological or biblical figures, but also of a number of allegories and…
