The Hunt in the Forest, a.1470s Paolo Uccello (1397-1475)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Paolo Uccello also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 10-12 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting The Hunt in the Forest is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A sweep of inky night envelops the scene, yet the forest floor vibrates with activity: riders in vermilion jerkins press their mounts forward, huntsmen on foot carve diagonal paths, and a pale constellation of greyhounds darts between slim saplings.  The trees, cropped at a uniform height as though pruned by unseen gardeners, form a vaulted arcade whose rhythmic trunks pace the eye towards a pin‑point vanishing centre, swallowing figures in its darkness.  Moonlight—more imagined than literal—finds discreet highlights on polished harness and metallic stirrup, setting a low murmur of movement against the hushed, nocturnal hush.

Chromatically, Paolo Uccello balances restraint and brilliance.  Against the almost velvety black‑green of the understorey, the red of jackets and saddle‑cloths flares like embers; ochres and pale violets temper the heat, while a sprinkling of gold‑leaf foliage flickers in the upper canopy, recalling mosaic tesserae.  The palette thus oscillates between naturalism and courtly display, establishing a theatrical arena in which colour orchestrates hierarchy: nobility blaze in red, servants recede in muted greys, the hounds shine spectral white, guiding our gaze as surely as the huntsmen’s spears.

Technically the panel is a hybrid of tempera and oil, the slow‑drying medium granting Uccello time to plot his perspectival lattice with mathematical precision.  Brushwork remains discreet—edges are firm, surfaces smoothed—yet the artist allows a livelier touch in the feathery ferns and the mottled coats of the dogs, small concessions to immediacy within an otherwise architectonic design.  His training in stained glass and mosaic echoes in the crisp silhouettes and the jewel‑like punctuations of colour that animate the dark ground.

Compositionally, the picture is a study in recession.  Spears, felled branches, and a reflective pool converge upon the distant focal point, while the rhythmic alternation of tree trunks functions almost as an isometric grid.  Figures shrink in logical cadence, yet Uccello suspends them in near‑stillness, freezing the narrative at the moment when anticipation is tautest, the quarry unseen.  Spatial coherence serves psychological tension: the deeper the forest, the more our attention is pulled into its mystery.

Painted in the later quattrocento for a domestic interior—likely as a spalliera panel—the work embodies the intellectual appetite of its age.  Perspective, recently systematised, becomes both scientific display and poetic device; the hunt, aristocratic pastime, doubles as coded allegory under Diana’s crescent silks.  Uccello, nicknamed “Bird” for his passion for the natural world, fuses empirical observation with courtly fantasy, offering not a mere record of sport but a meditation on order wrested from darkness, civilisation poised at the very edge of the unknown.