The young poacher 12 - 1889

Otto Scholderer made this drawing with pencil on paper. It is titled “The Young Poacher.” The image depicts two men and a dog resting in a field after a hunt; one of the men is carrying dead game. Scholderer was a German painter, born in Frankfurt. His images often dealt with rural life in the countryside around Frankfurt, and in this one we see how hunting was both a leisure activity and perhaps also a necessity for survival, in the late 19th century. However, it also hints at the politics of land ownership at the time, since peasants or poor rural people often supplemented their diets by hunting animals on land that they did not own. The term “poacher” therefore implies a challenge to the prevailing social order. To understand images like this better, historians of art consult archives of newspapers and court records, to see how poaching was regarded at the time, and to discover more about the social conditions that gave rise to it.