AESTAS (Summer) from a set of the Four Seasons

Although David Vinckboons made only three prints himself, his designs were the basis for more prints than any other Netherlandish artist in the early seventeen century. Pieter Serwouters was responsible for more two dozen of these, mainly engravings and etchings of both religious and secular subjects. The Crossbowman is a strikingly dramatic example of the latter. A hunter kneels on the ground, his bow aimed directly at the viewer. At the left crouches his dog, whose eyes are fixed on the prey, and at the right a basket of birds, the bounty of the hunt. In the tree above, an owl sits and defecates on the hunter’s head, while in the left background is a field with archers shooting at the target of a bird on a pole.


Below the subject is an inscription in Dutch warning the (female) viewers (women) of men with cocked crossbows Those sexual overtones would not be immediately clear to the modern viewer but images of hunting birds was often a reference to sexual misbehavior in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The meaning is more obvious in another print int the museum collection, the engraving after Jacques de Gheyn (49.95.1331) of The Archer and the Milkmaid where milkmaid embraces an archer with a very prominent codpiece as he aims his bow. The two prints have the same inscription.