Melchior De Hondecoeter

Anonymous sale, Amsterdam, Frederik Muller & Cie., 15 December 1908, lot 54;

Anonymous sale ('Succession de Monsieur X...'), Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 18 June 1920, lot 23;

Mrs. Dorothy Hart, Worthing, by 1952;

By whom posthumously sold ('Sold by Order of the Executors of the late Mrs. Dorothy Hart'), London, Christie's, 11 December 1987, lot 58;

Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby's, 1 June, 1990, lot 113a, for $165,000;

Where acquired by the present collector.

The Illustrated London News, 19 July 1952.

This delightful canvas exemplifies the theatrical imagination that made Melchior de Hondecoeter the foremost painter of avian subjects in the Dutch Golden Age. The composition is orchestrated around an assembly of domestic and exotic birds set within a wooded landscape. An owl presides above an open musical score, surrounded by smaller songbirds perched on branches as if participating in a choral performance. Below, a stately cockerel, pheasants, a magpie, and other birds animate the foreground, while a white dove sweeps dramatically across the right side of the canvas.

This work relates closely to two known autograph variants, both of which are similarly signed on the manuscript score: a picture of comparable dimensions, sold in April 2002 for £298,150;¹ and a smaller canvas, dated 1670, in which the composition is reversed, sold in October 2013 for €711,300.²

¹ https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-3898208

² https://www.dorotheum.com/it/l/4560826/