Ducks, hens and other fowl in a yard

Melchoir de Hondecoeter was born into a family of landscape and animal painters living in Utrecht. Following the death of his father, Gijsbert Gillisz. d'Hondecoeter, Melchior trained with his uncle Jan Baptiste Weenix. Working as an assistant in his uncle's studio, Melchior developed an early style close to Weenix, although he was also receptive to the work of Abraham van Beyeren. In 1663, he wed Susanna Tradel in Amsterdam and became a citizen of that city in 1668. There he made his reputation as a painter of game pieces and, most importantly, of live birds, such as those that appear in the present composition. In these paintings, Hondecoeter works in a style and follows a compositional formula that is greatly inspired by Frans Snyders. Hondecoeter took great interest in representing his subject with scientific fidelity and appears to have primarily worked from life-studies executed in oil. Melchior enjoyed such success and fame in this genre that in the nineteenth-century, he was known as the 'Raphael of bird painters'.

We are grateful to Fred Meijer, of the RKD in The Hague, for confirming the attribution on the basis of photographs (private communication, 10 December 2010). This unpublished painting served as the prototype of numerous copies of this composition, such as those offered at Sotheby's, Amsterdam, 14 March 2007, lot 1, and Christie's, London, 15 April 1992, lot 107.