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The titles which Claude inscribed on several of his paintings identify, for the most part, subjects which would otherwise be difficult to pin down. This scene of hunting, as Claude carefully noted on the canvas, is taken from Book VII of Virgil’s Aeneid.

The painting was commissioned by Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna as a companion to Dido and Aeneas at Carthage, a painting completed six years earlier. Despite the lapse of time which separates the two, they were probably planned, from the start, as a pair.

The buildings on the right side of Dido and Aeneas match the columns on the left side of Ascanius while the light enters from the right in the former and from the left in the latter. Both illustrate subjects from the Aeneid and both include the figure of Ascanius. In the painting, everything has been suffused with an air of fantasy. The hunters are impossibly elongated – Ascanius, in particular, is absurdly top-heavy - but even they are overwhelmed by the vast landscape, lit by a silvery sky, which arches over them and recedes far back into the blue, snow-capped hills.

Despite the signature and inscription which normally would have been added when the picture had been completed, the sky, sea, river and the hills on the right appear to be unfinished. It was Claude’s last painting and was probably still on the easel when he died on 23 November 1682.