The Wolf and Fox Hunt

Hunting scenes had been a popular subject for royal tapestries since the middle ages, and Rubens decided to disrupt that profitable market. From 1616 to 1621, Rubens made a series of hunting paintings — wild, over-the-top illustrations of snarling beasts and the brave men and women who would bring them down. These canvasses were so ambitiously large that they had to be trimmed to fit in the rooms they would be housed. Wolf and Fox Hunt was trimmed on the top and left, a client of Ruben’s saying “none but great Princes have houses fitt to hange it up in.”