“The Status of the Human”: Amy Freund on the First French Hunting Portrait

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies:  short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian.Amy Freund (Southern Methodist University) reveals the newly discovered Portrait of a Seated Hunter with His Dogs (1661), which dates to nearly forty years before the genre was previously believed to have emerged in France. This painting testifies to the creative as well as the destructive power of humans, challenging certain seventeenth-century conceptions of “man” by subverting assumed hierarchies of human and animal.