Painter, composer, poet, archaeologist and collector, Alfredo Keil (1850-1907) was the descendant of a German family settled in Portugal. His musical and plastic education was spent in cities like Munich and Nuremberg, which certainly influenced his close relationship with nature and a plastic language that was on the borderline between late Romanticism and pre-Naturalism.

He created several small format works, such as the present painting, where we can observe an outdoor scene with a hunter and his dog, the motif providing him with the pretext for an intimate and melancholic contemplation of nature. Alfredo Keil structures space through the green of the ground and the verticality of the trees against an open sky. In the centre of this autumnal clearing, a middle-aged hunter, in a profile that almost offers the viewer his back, pauses to observe his dog, whose attention has been caught by something on the ground. The chromatic range is quite narrow, which helps to harmonise the whole and to merge the beings into their surroundings. In the plastic treatment of the leaves, in the trees and on the ground, the golden autumnal hues reverberate, creating a luminous rhythm that opens and concentrates on the white of the dog. The motif of the painting is thus a pretext for Keil's intimate contemplation of nature, itself mimicking the suspension of attention and the harmony of his characters in the painting.

Besides the countless nature scenes he painted, Alfredo Keil also revealed himself to be a painter attentive to the city and its bourgeois interior scenes, revealing a sociological picture similar to that which was contemporarily fictionalised by writers such as Eça de Queiroz.

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