Page 36 - Pierre Durand Collection Including Chinese Art and Porcelain Sothebys Jan 27 2022

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MELCHIOR D'HONDECOETER (UTRECHT 1636-1695
AMSTERDAM)
A sarus crane, a flamingo, a wild bronze turkey cock, two Paduan
fowl, a silver birchen game cockerel, and a hoopoe in a landscape
signed and dated 'MD hondecoeter. / 1675' (center right)
oil on canvas
61√ x 69√ in. (157.2 x 177.5 cm.)
$250,000-350,000
PROVENANCE:
Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 10 December 1993, lot 296, where
acquired by Covent Garden Gallery, acting on behalf of the present owner.
Melchior d’Hondecoeter was the leading bird painter during the Dutch
Golden Age, a fact which earned him the moniker the ‘Raphael of bird
painters’ in the nineteenth century. The present painting is a particularly
fine, large-scale example of his work in which exotic birds feature in the
foreground of a courtyard or lush garden setting, at times – as here –
including a classical structure in the background. Hondecoeter’s visual
vocabulary developed in the studios of his father, Gijsbert Gillisz. de
Hondecoeter, and his uncle, Jan Baptist Weenix, but Melchior’s works are
equally informed by the those of the Antwerp artist Frans Snyders.
Such paintings were avidly acquired by Amsterdam’s patrician elite, who
frequently installed them within the spacious interiors of their country
estates, some of which contained actual menageries on their grounds.
Though common to modern viewers, Hondecoeter has selected what would
have been rarely encountered species to the seventeenth-century viewer – a
wild turkey and American flamingo (indicated by the pink and white bill with
pronounced black tip) from the Americas; a sarus crane, which is indigenous
to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia; and an African hoopoe.
Taken together with the local European fowl at center, the represented birds
originated in each of the four known continents in the seventeenth century
and signaled the extent of the Republic’s global reach.
Hondecoeter developed his large-scale paintings through ad vivum
drawings and oil sketches of birds captured in various poses which were
often repurposed in multiple compositions. An identical hoopoe reappears
in several other works, including the Birds on a balustrade of circa 1680
(Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and another painting sold Christie’s, New York,
29 January 1999, lot 179. Similarly, the same flamingo features again in a
painting dated 1679 at Dyrham Park, South Gloucestershire.