This is one of the elegant hunting scenes Wouwerman painted in the early 1660s that reveal his extraordinary talent as landscape artist. In these works, rather than depicting a hunting scene set in front of a landscape, as was typical of his A Stop at an Inn (P2152), he presents a vast panoramic view that occupies the entire surface and is adorned with figures of hunters and animals, diverse genre scenes and picturesque buildings. These panoramas are essentially a Dutch version of the Italianised landscapes which prevailed in the Netherlands in the 1640s owing to the influence of artists who had worked in Rome.

Here, the horizon line is higher and the sky is therefore less predominant than is typically the case in the classic Dutch landscape. The figures, now almost minute, are no longer placed, frieze-like, in the foreground, as in A Stop at an Inn (P2152), but inserted and distributed throughout the landscape, which is depicted from a higher perspective. The groupings are also more complex and dynamic, and are designed to direct the viewer`s gaze through the different scenes represented towards the back of the picture, where a small port is just visible at the edge of what may be a river estuary.

The delicate range of blues and pinks and the highly subtle use of light are characteristic of the hunting scenes which Wouwerman began to produce in the early 1660s. He retains the device of the white horse as a source of brightness, common in his initial works. However, the horse painted here bears no resemblance to the cruder models of his first compositions, inspired by Pieter van Laer (1599-after 1642). Instead, it is a Spanish thoroughbred of the kind Wouwerman introduced into his works after 1660. In the royal inventories and the Museum`s older catalogues, this hunting scene is shown as a companion piece to Hare Hunting (Posada Kubissa, T.: Pintura holandesa en el Museo Nacional del Prado. Catálogo razonado, 2009, p. 320).