Die Wildeschweinjagd.

Title

Die Wildeschweinjagd.

Description

Decorative representation of a boar hunting with numerous hunters and dogs. After the original painting of rus Paulus Rubens. Lithographed from C. Straub, issued from Hanfstaengel.

ca. 1850

Artist

Hanfstaengel (1804-1877)

Franz Seraph Hanfstaengl (1804- 1877) Munich was a German painter, lithographer and photographer. Franz Hanfstaengl came from a long-established farming family from Baiernrain near Tölz and in 1816, on the recommendation of the village school teacher, joined the drawing class at the holiday school run by Hermann Josef Mitterer in Munich. He was trained in lithography, had contact with Alois Senefelder and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1819-25. He set up his own lithographic studio, which he ran until 1868 and to which he added an art print shop in 1853. In 1835-52, Hanfstaengl produced around 200 lithographic reproductions of masterpieces from the Dresden Picture Gallery and published them in a portfolio. The establishment he founded in 1833 continued to operate as an art publishing house under his name after his death until 1980. This business was professionalized from 1868 by Franz Hanfstaengl's son Edgar, who worked commercially and overseas. The writer Thomas Mann ironized his mass reproduction of art in his 1902 novella Gladius Dei by describing him and his “reproduction industry” as the “Blüthenzweig art dealership”. Hanfstaengl's grave is located in the Old Southern Cemetery in Munich.

Historical Description

Hunting is one of the most primitive activities in human history and is older than anatomically modern humans themselves. The oldest undisputed archaeological evidence for hunting dates from the Old Pleistocene and coincides with the emergence and spread of Homo erectus about 1.7 million years ago. Hunting enabled significant steps in human evolution through the associated need for specialization, division of labor, and advance planning among hunters, such as in the production of tools and hunting weapons. Jointly conducted hunting promoted social and communicative skills and formed one of the foundations of human culture. With the spread of sedentarization of man in the course of the Neolithic Revolution and the beginning of agriculture and animal husbandry, hunting became of secondary importance as a source of nutrition for large parts of the population. At the same time, the changed living conditions in the protection of cultivated land from game damage and the control of predators to protect livestock also resulted in new uses for hunting. In the course of time the most different kinds of hunting have developed, which are adapted to special situations or the hunting of certain animal species. There are several ways to systematize at least some of the hunting types. One of the most common classifications distinguishes according to the number of hunters involved, especially in individual and social hunting.