After the Hunt, Neal’s first great success, was a transitional work between his early architectural paintings and the history paintings that were to win him renown. Although not a history painting, it demonstrates his total mastery of the technique that would make those paintings so successful. Produced while Neal worked in Piloty’s atelier, After the Hunt exemplifies the style of romantic realism practiced and taught by his professor. During the late 1860s Piloty had transformed the teaching of the Munich academy by introducing an emphasis on skillful painting technique. Although based on the work of the old masters, the style he taught was capable of impressive realism of lighting and textures. It also reflected painstaking research of authentic settings, costumes, and accessories. After the Hunt, with its baroque lighting, dramatic contrasts, and rich, warm tonality, strikes the note of romanticism central to the style. The aristocratic hunter and the servant girl dressed in period costume, nominally the subject of the painting, are secondary to the foreground still-life arrangement, in which Neal’s virtuosity has persuasively reproduced a wide range of textures. Still-life compositions are rare in the Munich tradition in contrast to that of Vienna, where this type--the corner of a room with a table piled with bric-a-brac -- was known. Two other Americans, WILLIAM M. CHASE and Theodore Wores (18601939), also included background figures in the most important still life they produced during their student years in Munich. Neal’s painting originally bore the title Retour de Chasse and was reproduced in Aldine in 1872 as After the Chase.

After the centennial of 1876 the foremost place for American artists to show was no longer New York but Paris. By the late nineteenth century the Paris Salon was the most important exhibition space in the Western world. Artists from many nations would submit their best works to its annual exhibition. The honor of being accepted presaged an artist’s future success. Thousands of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper were presented at each Salon; the exhibition halls were so crowded that paintings were hung to the ceiling with sculptures scattered about. To be hung “on the line” (at eye level) meant a work of art ranked among the best in the show. Since a painting might be skied (hung near the ceiling), many artists painted on a large scale to ensure that their work could be seen no matter where it was placed.
Contrary to earlier periods, American painting in the late 1800s was no longer dominated by a single aesthetic. Munich-school paintings—narrative scenes, often based on literature or history and painted in a dark palette—as well as small figure paintings in the realist tradition were popular in both France and the United States. Large portraits represent the academic style that dominated official taste during this era. Bright, sun-drenched scenes by a more progressive group of artists, the impressionists are diametrically opposite in color, mood, and concept to muted tonalist and symbolist works. Whereas the impressionists celebrated contemporary life with all its transformations, the tonalists and symbolists created hazily illuminated, dreamlike imagery.
Sculptures range from academic examples of idealized mythological imagery to expressions of the newer interest in the emotive potential of the human form. Equestrian bronzes by Frederic Remington demonstrate that at the turn of the century there was a continuing enthusiasm for heroic depictions of the West despite the increased internationalism of American taste.

• About the Era.
• Sharp, Kevin, ed. Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016.
• Quick, Michael.  American Expatriate Painters of the Late Nineteenth Century.  Dayton: The Dayton Art Institute, 1976.
• Fort, Ilene Susan and Michael Quick.  American Art:  a Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collection.  Los Angeles:  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991.