Hunting in the Pontine Marshes

Horace Vernet

National Gallery of Art

A leafless, ash-white tree trunk has fallen from a broken stump into the wide V of a neighboring tree at the edge of a body of water near a verdant forest in this horizontal landscape painting. The fallen trunk creates a diagonal from near the lower left corner to the upper right. As it fell, it sheared off a substantial branch from a neighboring tree with a dark trunk. The bark where the damaged branch has pulled away is honey-orange, the same color as the leaves at the canopy, which has been pinned under the fallen trunk. Trees, vines, and other vegetation fill the space around and beyond this pair. In the lower right corner of the painting, vines grow over a broken stump, which deep in shadow. Between the stump and fallen tree, the peanut-brown surface of the water is smooth. Tiny in scale beneath the fallen tree and easily overlooked, there are two men and a dog in a boat. One man stands at the back of the boat and pushes it along with a long pole. He wears a tall, brown, cloth hat, a white shirt rolled up to the elbows under a blue vest, and loose-fitting pants. A second man wears a flat-topped, white hat with a black brim, a long, forest-green jacket, and tight-fitting slate-blue pants. He braces a rifle against one shoulder and shoots into the forest. The dog is white with brown spots, and it stands with its front paws on the edge of the boat, presumably ready to spring after the target. A patch of blue sky with puffy white clouds is seen above the trees in the upper left corner. The artist signed and dated the work in the lower right corner: “H. Vernet Rome 1833.”