Jagdgründe der Kunst

Shooting animals to be able to paint them better. Cow paintings as camouflage for partridge hunting. Awards for antlers and paintings at the same exhibition. In European history, the paths of hunting and art intersected in various ways. They could share techniques, locations, and motifs. It was not only with the bang and flash of photography that hunting became a popular field of metaphorical art. Rather, hunting and art were widespread practices of understanding, experiencing, and mastering nature between the Early Modern period and Modernity. Numerous artists hunted themselves. They confidently highlighted this in their portraits and declared it the foundation of their hunting, animal, and landscape paintings. As this book documents for the first time, hunting and art share a common cultural history that goes beyond functional and iconographic aspects and addresses the fundamental relationship of humans to both living and non-living surroundings.