The Halt of a Hawking Party is a characteristic example of Wouwermans’s treatment of subject-matter and style. The painting was in the Jan Gildemeester and the Smeth van Alphen collections in Amsterdam at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was purchased by George IV in 1811. The mixture of classes – the elegant company on horseback, the servants from the wayside inn on the left and the gypsy woman with her child on foot trying to catch the attention of the man with the hawk – provides a cross-section of society as it makes its way through the Dutch countryside. There is an atmosphere of intense activity in Wouwermans’s paintings. People are always on the move: the small figures are like puppets with jerky actions and hands and limbs at odd angles. But, at the same time, the artist is a wonderful technician and, like many of his pictures, The Halt of the Hawking Party is memorable for its lightness of touch, delicacy of colour and control over incidental detail. The couple on grey horses hold the centre of the composition, but from that point the eye is led outwards in several directions as though along the spokes of a wheel acting like a centrifugal force. The silvery tone also creates a rippling surface that generates a further sense of perpetual motion like the changing light on a cloudy day.

Signed lower left corner: 'PHW' (in monogram)

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