Arnold van de Laar (1886-1974) - Jager

Impressive and large-scale hunting scene by Arnold van de Laar (1886-1974), executed in oil on canvas and signed bottom left A. v.d. Laar, dated 1924. With a canvas size of about 115 × 91 cm, the painting has a monumental format; including the frame it measures about 133 × 106 × 4 cm.

Van de Laar builds the composition around a hunter in a striking red garment, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, with rifle and hunting horn. Around him gathers a carefully worked-out pack of hunting dogs. The various animals are depicted individually, with great attention to anatomy, stance, fur markings, and interlocking overlapping. Especially the elongated greyhounds in the foreground give the composition a strong horizontal movement, while the diagonally rising rifle provides a powerful counterpoint.

What stands out is the pronounced spatial construction. The detailed foreground with dogs and dark vegetation fades into an open, brownish hilly landscape, above which a large portion of the canvas is taken up by a dramatic cloudy sky. Heavy grey-green clouds alternate with bright blue-green patches and warmly lit cloud edges. The strong red of the hunter forms the main color accent and immediately draws the eye to the center of the scene.

The painterly handling alternates between finely worked figurative passages and broader, softer strokes in the landscape and sky. This creates a clear distinction between the precisely depicted figures in the foreground and the atmospheric massing in the distance. The classical composition, the pronounced chiaroscuro, and the attention to historical costume align with Van de Laar’s intensive study of the painting technique and visual language of old masters.

Artist biography

Arnold van de Laar (’s-Hertogenbosch, 1886 – Vught, 1974) was a Dutch painter and paintings restorer with a special interest in historical painting techniques. Between 1913 and 1930 he had access to the Rijksmuseum to study paintings from the collection in depth and to restore them to the original state. This practice brought him directly into contact with the composition, color treatment, and painting technique of old masters.

In addition to this study, Van de Laar developed an independent painterly oeuvre. His artistry and position within the Brabant art world have been extensively explored in the monograph A Thousand-Artist in Den Bosch: Arnold van de Laar and the Brabant Art World (1886-1974). In 2016 Museum Slager in ’s-Hertogenbosch devoted the exhibition Copy versus Autonomy to his oeuvre, in which both his independent painting and his intensive study of historical masterpieces were central.