Polar bear hunt on the coast of Norway?

Polar Bear Hunt on the Coast of Norway captures an exotic and violent subject that fascinated seventeenth-century European audiences. Dutch and Flemish whaling and hunting expeditions to the Arctic had been underway since the 1590s, when Willem Barentsz made his famous voyages in search of a northeast passage. By 1650, when Peeters painted this canvas, Arctic hunting scenes had become a distinct sub-genre of marine painting—part documentary record, part wonder cabinet image. Polar bears were entirely unknown to most European viewers except through such images and the occasional specimen brought back alive. Peeters treats the scene with dramatic intensity: the confrontation between hunters in small boats and the bear on the ice edge was genuinely dangerous and this tension is preserved in the composition.

The palette shifts dramatically from the warm harbour tones typical of Peeters's work to icy whites, pale blues, and grey-greens that evoke Arctic cold. The bear is the compositional focal point, its white fur painted with careful attention to form. Ice floes in the foreground are handled with broad, flat strokes.