Diana and her maidens after the hunt, in a wooded landscape

The image of Diana as an allegory of hunting, surrounded by its trappings, may originate in a print of 1597 entitled Venatio, made after a drawing by Jan van der Straet, also called Stradanus, a student of Giorgio Vasari. The theme of the hunting goddess became increasingly popular as a subject for pictures in the Netherlands at the turn of the 17th century, with hunting being then the aristocratic pastime par excellence. It also provided a noble pretext to display attractive female nudes in idyllic landscapes.

The result of a collaborative endeavour, this picture combines Hendrik van Balen’s alluring draped figures with Abraham Govaerts’s carefully-rendered landscape. A friend of both Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, with whom he also collaborated, van Balen was a prominent member of the thriving Antwerp artistic community during the first half of the 17th century. Reputed for his brightly attired and fleshy nudes, he was head dean of the painters’ guild in 1609 and in the same year became the young Anthony van Dyck’s teacher. A gifted landscape painter, Govaerts demonstrates his ability at depicting fine details in the grassy patch to the right foreground where each flower – the myosotis, iris and lily of the valley – is depicted with a miniaturist touch.