Pferde vor einem Jagdschloss (Horses at a Hunting Lodge), 1845

Albrecht Adam began training as a painter in Munich in 1807 and as a protégé of Johann Georg von Dillis¹ rose to become painter to the court of Eugène de Beauharnais.² As a specialist in battle scenes and equestrian painting, the artist took part in the Bavarian campaign against Austria of 1809 and was in Beauharnais’s entourage when the French went to war against Russia in 1812. The drawings and oil sketches that Adam produced on the battlefield were later translated into cycles of lithographs. His work was of such a high calibre that the kings of Bavaria, Maximilian I Joseph and Ludwig I awarded him numerous commissions, as did the Austrian Emperror Franz Joseph.³ Dominated by the three horses in the foreground, this particular work, for which Adam chose the no less popular genre of the hunting scene, was a chance to put his considerable skill to the test. The hunting trophies flanking the gateway to the building in the background identify it as a hunting lodge. Sitting on a bench to the left of the entrance is an exhausted-looking driver, watching the day’s kill being unloaded from a horse-drawn cart. The slain animals, which include wildboar, hares, a roe deer and a fox, are piled up limply in the foreground. The artist, however, skillfully stages the light so that this scene remains in shade and the viewers’ gaze is automatically drawn to the horses. The different angles from which each of these noble beasts is depicted give the artist ample opportunity to show off his prodigious talent as an equestrian painter. As if to underscore his mastery of this métier, moreover, Adam has the chestnut mare shown in profile raise a hind fetlock so that he can reproduce in detail the muscles activated to this end.

The patron who might have commissioned such a work would have to be sought in aristocratic circles, given that at the time it was painted, hunting was still very much a prerogative of the nobility. Such meticulous representations were directed at recipients who knew all about horses and equine anatomy and hence commissioned only artists like Albrecht Adam, who could be counted on to get the details right. Indeed, Adam ranks alongside Peter von Hess and Wilhelm von Kobell⁴ as one of the outstanding equestrian and battle-scene painters of the first half of the nineteenth century.