Jan Weenix specialised in painting hunting-trophy pictures. As a theme the tradition was stronger in Flemish art, with painters such as Frans Snyders, than in Dutch art, simply because in Holland hunting in whatever form was not such a popular pastime. The compositions devised by Weenix are elaborate, involving not only dead game but the instruments of the chase - bags, cartridges, whistles, nets, snares, knives and rifles - and extensive settings in parklands or spacious gardens with sculpture or ornamental urns. Although no country house is shown in Dead hare,  the garden with statuary and water suggests a large country estate. There is often a mournful air over the proceedings in these pictures: the encroaching twilight, dead animals, an absence of humanity and only the flowers or the trees to remind the viewer of the beauty of living nature, but even these aspects are of course transitory.

The dead hare was one of the artist’s oft-repeated motifs: in 1704 alone for example it also occurs dominantly in Dead hare, fruit and monkey in the Wallace Collection, London, and A monkey and a dog beside dead game and fruits in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. In many respects such pictures herald those by the French painters Jean Baptiste Oudry and Jean Baptiste Chardin in the eighteenth century.

Signed and dated on side of slab of stone lower right: 'J. Weenix.f.1704'

Catalogue entry adapted from Enchanting the Eye: Dutch paintings of the Golden Age, London, 2004