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| Peacocks |
Artist:Melchior d' Hondecoeter (Dutch, Utrecht 1636–1695 Amsterdam)
Date:1683
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:74 7/8 x 53 in. (190.2 x 134.6 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Gift of Samuel H. Kress, 1927
Hondecoeter represents the fourth generation of a family of painters originally from Flanders. He grew up in Utrecht but from 1663 onward worked in Amsterdam. His large pictures of exotic birds in parklike landscapes decorated elegant town houses, the residents of which also enjoyed or imagined retreats to country estates.
Catalogue Entry
Melchior d'Hondecoeter, who specialized in decorative paintings of fowl, represents the fourth generation of a family of painters that originally came from Flanders. He studied with his father, Gijsbert d'Hondecoeter (1604–1653), a painter of similar subjects, and with his uncle Jan Baptist Weenix (1621–1660/61). This large and splendid picture, dated 1683, is one of about twenty works that allow a tentative outline of the artist's chronology.
The trees and architecture depicted here (though the building's motifs are contemporary with the painting) suggest a grand old country estate. It was in such settings that aristocratic Europeans assembled rare birds and animals, cultivated unusual plants, and collected shells and other naturalia. Like earlier still-life painters, in particular Otto Marseus van Schrieck (1619/20–1678), Hondecoeter turned curiosities of nature into curiosities of art, and—on the scale seen in this painting—into elements of interior decoration. The peacock, which served as a symbol of pride in much earlier Netherlandish pictures, would have been recognized immediately as a creature from another continent, in this case southeastern Asia and the East Indies. In the confines of a room hung with paintings by Hondecoeter, it was easy to imagine not only the great outdoors of the Dutch countryside but also the entire world of Dutch overseas trade.
The crane, at left, was painted out at an unknown date and revealed by cleaning in 1956. It is present in an eighteenth-century copy by an anonymous Dutch watercolorist. In 1971, the watercolor appeared in a sale together with another of the same size that records a Hondecoeter composition depicting ducks and a pelican in a foreign landscape (Sotheby's, London, November 25, 1971, nos. 7–8). This suggests the possibility that the MMA canvas originally had a pendant. On the other hand, the watercolors could have come from a larger set or have been arbitrarily paired.
The cropping of birds and animals at the sides of the composition, as seen in this work, is common in the artist's oeuvre.
[2011; adapted from Liedtke 2007]
Copyright Image
https://images.metmuseum.org
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