by Tom Gurney
Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Published on June 19, 2020 / Updated on October 14, 2026
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000
A rider pulled into the centre
In Rubens's Lion Hunt, men, horses and lions meet at a point of crisis. A lion seizes the white-clothed rider near the centre and drags him downward from his horse. Another hunter raises a weapon; a horse rears behind them; bodies have already fallen at the front. The movement is so tightly packed that it takes a moment to separate the animals and people. Rubens does not show the calm start of a hunt or its orderly end. He sets the viewer at the instant when pursuit has turned into a struggle for survival.
The image on this page shows the large 1621 Munich painting, not every work called Lion Hunt that Rubens designed. The Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen catalogue[1] assigns it inventory 602, records an oil painting on canvas, and gives its picture dimensions as 248.7 × 377.3 centimetres. Its credit reads Peter Paul Rubens with Jan Wildens. That joint attribution belongs in the title and caption even though the catalogue does not identify which precise brushstrokes are Wildens's. The same Munich collection owns a much smaller Rubens oil sketch for the hunt, inventory 15475; it is a distinct object.
The wide canvas spreads the danger from left to right while drawing the eye back to the centre. A red garment lifts over a rider at the upper left, and a dark mounted figure presses in from the upper right. These outer accents form a frame around the white-clothed man and the lion. Along the lower edge, fallen hunters and a crouching animal bring the encounter close to our space. There is little safe ground from which to watch: the combat seems to reach across the picture rather than staying at a comfortable distance.
At a Glance
- ArtistsPeter Paul Rubens with Jan Wildens [1]
- Date1621 [1]
- MediumOil on canvas [1]
- Dimensions248.7 × 377.3 cm (picture) [1]
- CollectionBayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, 602 [1]
- Related sketchOil on wood, 44 × 50 cm, Munich 15475 [2]
Where this work sits in Rubens's career
The Elevation of the Cross
1609–10The Descent from the Cross
1611–14The Lion Hunt
1621The Garden of Love
1630–35The Three Graces
1630–35Contents
- What happens in the painting?
- Rubens, Wildens and a large workshop painting
- A small sketch for a huge canvas
- Older art remade as a hunt
- From painting to drawing to engraving
- Copies and the problem of the title
What happens in the painting?
The Munich museum identifies the rider attacked and pulled from his horse as the focal motif. Around him, horses rear and strike out with their hooves; hunters thrust spears; one draws back a sword. Each action implies another. The horse's upward lunge throws its rider into danger, the lion's attack pulls him down, and the other men close in with weapons. Rather than a single heroic hunter triumphing over a beast, the composition presents several simultaneous attempts to respond to one violent event.
Look first for the rider in white. His body cuts diagonally through the centre, giving the eye a bright path into an otherwise tangled group. The lion has caught him before the men around him can finish their attack. Then look outward to the horses. They are not simply mounts carrying armed men into the scene; their heads, forelegs and chests are part of the struggle. Rubens uses their size to make the contest exceed the scale of a human duel. A hunter's weapon may reach into the mass, but no person can control all its movements.
The figures at the bottom are just as important as the riders above. Their low positions show what is at stake in the upward thrust of the horses and weapons. The canvas joins the moment before a blow with evidence of blows already suffered. That arrangement creates suspense without requiring the viewer to know the names of the hunters or a written plot. It is a staged hunt, not an illustration of one recorded expedition. The museum gives the subject and object history; it does not identify a specific historical event taking place here.
The low viewpoint increases the force of the action. In Maurice Saß's recent art-historical study[9], the unusually low horizon puts viewers near the level of the fallen hunter, so that the mass appears ready to fall towards them. This is a scholar's interpretation of the picture's effect. It accords with the visible compression of bodies near the foreground, but it need not be turned into a claim about exactly where a seventeenth-century audience stood when looking at the canvas.
Rubens, Wildens and a large workshop painting
The attribution Rubens with Jan Wildens is a useful reminder that a monumental painting could be the product of more than one painter. Rubens supplied the design that the Munich catalogue connects with his oil sketch. Wildens is named alongside him in the current holding record. The record does not divide the lion, horses, landscape, sky or other passages into individually documented hands, so it would be misleading to label a specific tree or cloud as Wildens's work on this evidence alone.
This caution does not diminish the collaboration. A broad canvas asks its painters to make figures, animals and setting cohere at a distance. The landscape is not a separate calm background: the clouded opening above the figures leaves room for the upward push of spears and hooves, while the darker sides concentrate the action. What matters to the viewer is how the surrounding space intensifies the bodies. The institution's shared credit acknowledges Wildens's participation while leaving the exact division of labour open.
The museum's stated 1621 date places the painting among Rubens's ambitious hunting subjects of the 1610s and early 1620s. It is tempting to describe all his hunt paintings as one fixed series. The institutional records, however, identify different canvases with different sizes, dates, subjects and collaborators. Munich's Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt, for example, is a separate work with its own commission history. A broad artistic interest in hunting should not make the two paintings into interchangeable parts of one undocumented order.
A small sketch for a huge canvas
The same museum holds Rubens's oil sketch for the Lion Hunt[2], inventory 15475. It measures only 44 × 50 centimetres and is painted on wood, unlike the nearly four-metre-wide canvas. Munich describes its rapid brush marks, coloured patches and streaked ground. In this compact form, Rubens could test the main attack and the surrounding movement before the subject was worked out at a much larger scale.
The sketch already concentrates on the lion taking a rider from his horse. That continuity is important: the startling centre of the finished picture was not an afterthought inserted only when work moved to canvas. Yet a sketch is not a reduced photograph of the final state. Quick marks indicate relationships, colour and direction without specifying every form. The finished scene gives the horse, the falling body and the armed figures more weight and more complicated overlaps. Reading the two works together shows both the persistence of the central idea and the changes required by a monumental painting.
The Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung's account[3] describes the sketch as an early idea, with repeated starts and painted-over decisions. It calls the main group more developed than the surrounding elements. That is a reason to look carefully at the centre of the small panel: Rubens was working out the knot of action, not merely filling a small rectangle with a complete miniature scene. The foundation helped acquire the sketch in 1996, according to the museum's record; this date belongs to the sketch's modern collection history, not to the making of the large painting.
There is an unexpected second subject on the reverse of that same small wooden support. Munich identifies it as a study for The Marriage by Proxy in the Marie de' Medici cycle and dates the two sides 1621 and 1622. The foundation describes this as one of Rubens's uncommon surviving oil sketches painted on both faces. The reverse does not mean that the lion hunt and royal marriage are episodes in one story. It shows a support reused for two different projects at a busy point in Rubens's career. The finished Lion Hunt in the Alte Pinakothek remains the canvas 602, not the two-sided panel 15475.
Older art remade as a hunt
The museum compares a lion's claws gripping a horse with a classical model and sees an influence of Leonardo da Vinci's Battle of Anghiari in the horses. These are comparisons of visual ideas, not proof that Rubens saw a surviving ancient sculpture or Leonardo's original fresco at a particular moment. Leonardo's battle project no longer survives as a completed original for us to inspect in the way we can inspect Rubens's canvas.
The Louvre holds a large drawing associated with Rubens's engagement with the Battle of Anghiari[4], inventory 20271. Its catalogue explains that the central sheet began as a sixteenth-century Italian copy after Leonardo's lost battle composition; it was subsequently worked on and enlarged, substantially by Rubens. The Louvre also records Anne-Marie Logan's proposed attribution of the original sheet to an anonymous Italian hand. This layered object makes the transmission concrete: Rubens could study and transform a copy of a lost design. It is inaccurate to say simply that he copied the original fresco directly.
What might the battle have offered him? Straining horses, tightly locked opponents, faces forced into the effort of combat and a sense that every body affects another. Munich's comparison directs attention to this shared visual problem. Rubens replaces a fight among soldiers with a hunt in which lions become the most dangerous participants. The fact of resemblance does not tell us how much the Anghiari material determined each figure in the finished painting. It does show how an artist's encounter with an earlier design could supply a vocabulary of force rather than a scene to reproduce literally.
Saß reads the Munich painting through that contrast. He argues that Rubens lowers the horizon and concentrates the action around the lion's bite, giving the viewer less distance than in the Anghiari model. His essay also considers hunting as a way artists and patrons represented mastery over animals and nature. That wider argument is a critical reading, not a label supplied by the painting itself. The image certainly shows human violence and animal resistance; whether we see the hunters as triumphant, threatened or both is part of the discomfort Rubens's composition permits.
From painting to drawing to engraving
The Lion Hunt travelled beyond Munich through drawings and prints. The Louvre catalogues a related drawing[5], inventory INV 20305, as a copy after Rubens, retouched by Rubens. Its entry says the drawing was made for an engraving by Schelte à Bolswert and reproduces the Munich painting. The drawing is in black chalk and wash with white highlights and was pricked for transfer. That evidence places it in a print-making sequence rather than among Rubens's first thoughts for the large canvas.
The Louvre notes that the drawing's composition is somewhat less complete than the engraving and may have been cut down on all four sides. A viewer who compares the sheet with the painted hunt should therefore allow for loss at its edges, as well as choices made when the design changed medium. The Louvre also mentions a variant drawing in the Albertina, Vienna. Such related sheets should not be collapsed into one “original drawing” without attention to their different catalogue descriptions and functions.
The National Museum in Wrocław owns an impression of Bolswert's engraving[6]. Its record names Bolswert as engraver and publisher and Rubens as designer, gives a first-half-of-the-seventeenth-century date, and transcribes a dedication to Alexander de Croÿ, prince of Chimay. The dedication establishes the print's addressee, not the first patron of the Munich canvas. The print could distribute a famous hunting design to people who never saw the full-size painting. It also allowed a viewer to study figures and movements on a sheet of paper, at a different scale and in a different visual language.
The original patron is a more complicated question than Munich's acquisition line suggests. The Wrocław print record says the Munich canvas was commissioned by Maximilian I of Bavaria, but Getty's museum publication on Rubens's hunting scenes[7] identifies the Lion Hunt acquired by Maximilian as a different, earlier canvas, formerly in Bordeaux and now lost. That work measured about 248 × 324 cm, substantially narrower than Munich inventory 602. The shared title has encouraged the two pictures to be confused.
For the 1621 Munich painting, Saß's 2024 study[9] considers a commission from the English envoy John Digby, intended for James, Marquess of Hamilton, likely. Rubens's September 1621 correspondence mentions such a large lion hunt, but linking that document to Munich 602 involves historical reconstruction. Saß cautions that Rubens's description of the picture as entirely his own work served a persuasive purpose; the Munich museum now credits Wildens as well. The holding record establishes only that the painting later came from the Munich Electoral Gallery. It does not prove a commission by Maximilian, and the precise route from the first owner to that gallery is not settled by this online record.
Copies and the problem of the title
“Lion Hunt” is a broad title, and the Bavarian state collection itself contains a later copy after Rubens[8], inventory 6209, dated before 1785. That canvas is listed at 250 × 432 centimetres and is credited as a copy after Rubens. It is not the same object as the 1621 Rubens and Wildens painting, inventory 602, even though the subject and title closely resemble it. The differing width and attribution are practical ways to keep them apart.
The distinction also matters when tracing reception. A print after the composition, a copied canvas and a preparatory oil sketch may each preserve or alter its arrangement. None can be treated as a neutral duplicate of the finished Munich work. When a source says “Rubens's Lion Hunt,” the collection and inventory number tell us which object is meant. On this page, the subject is consistently the wide Alte Pinakothek canvas with the white-clothed rider at its centre.
The painting's achievement lies in that centre's ability to hold a wide and unruly scene together. Lions and armed men are locked into a contest whose outcome is not yet visible. The bright falling body, rearing horses and converging weapons create a clear structure without calming the violence. Rubens planned that structure in a small sketch, developed it with Wildens on a much larger canvas, and saw the design enter a later print pathway. Each stage makes a different part of the work's history visible.
Rubens artworks directory
Frequently Asked Questions
The canvas is in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, inventory 602. The museum separately owns oil sketch 15475.
The museum dates the finished painting 1621 and records oil on canvas. Its picture measures 248.7 × 377.3 cm.
The Munich holding record credits Peter Paul Rubens with Jan Wildens. It does not map exact passages to the two painters, so individual assignments should remain cautious.
No. The sketch is a 44 × 50 cm oil-on-wood panel, inventory 15475. Its reverse has a study for the Marie de' Medici cycle. The large hunt is canvas 602.
The Louvre's INV 20305 is catalogued as a copy after Rubens retouched by him for a Bolswert engraving after the Munich painting. It belongs to the design's later circulation in print, not to the first planning stage of the canvas.
No. The Bavarian collection also lists a later copy, inventory 6209. Its attribution, dimensions and collection history differ from those of the 1621 Rubens and Wildens canvas.
Discussion
Look closely at how the lion, the falling rider and the horses pull the scene together.
Share an observation about the painting or a reliable source that adds to its history.
Reader Insights
How does the low view change your sense of the danger?
What does the small two-sided sketch reveal about Rubens's planning?
Which claims about Jan Wildens can the museum's shared credit support?
Join the Conversation
Add your reading below, keeping observations specific and evidence clear.
References
- Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Lion Hunt , inventory 602. View source
- Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, two-sided Lion Hunt oil sketch, inventory 15475. View source
- Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung, account of the two-sided Rubens oil sketch. View source
- Louvre, Rubens and earlier hands after Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari , INV 20271. View source
- Louvre, drawing after the Munich hunt retouched by Rubens for engraving, INV 20305. View source
- National Museum in Wrocław, Schelte à Bolswert's engraving after Rubens. View source
- Getty Research Institute, Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship , identifying Maximilian's earlier, lost Bordeaux Lion Hunt as a distinct canvas. View source
- Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, later Lion Hunt copy after Rubens, inventory 6209. View source
- Maurice Saß, “The Predatory Core: Peter Paul Rubens and the Hunt,” The Art Bulletin 106 (2024), 6–32. View source
