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Melchior d'Hondecoeter

Dutch, 1636 - 1695

BiographyBorn Utrecht, 1636; died Amsterdam, 3 April 1695.

Painter, grandson of Gillis de Hondecoutre. His first teacher was his father Gijsbert Gillisz. de Hondecoutre, after whose death Melchior was taught by his uncle Jan Baptist Weenix. Melchior apparently became an assistant in his uncle’s studio, and his earliest signed and dated work Dog Defending Dead Game against a Bird of Prey (1658; Le Havre, Mus. B.-A.) is in the style of Weenix.

Hondecoeter is mentioned as active in Pictura, The Hague painters’ confraternity in 1659–63; his presentation piece was originally a seascape, which he withdrew and replaced with an animal painting. If the signature is correct on a painting dated 1661, Still-life with Fish Pail (Brunswick, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Mus.), he also experimented with a style and subject most closely associated with Abraham van Beyeren. While at The Hague he had a student, Willem Frederik van Royen (1645–1723), who became painter to the court at Potsdam.

On 9 February 1663 Hondecoeter married Susanna Tradel in Amsterdam. There is one dated picture of ducks and poultry from that year, but no further dated works are known until 1668. That year, on 16 March, he was granted citizenship of Amsterdam; he lived on the Lauriergracht there until his death. In 1668 he painted two pictures, Animals and Plants (Amsterdam, Rijksmus.) and Birds, Butterflies and a Frog among Plants and Fungi (London, N.G.), which borrow heavily from works by Abraham Begeyn. But most of the paintings dated 1668 and thereafter are either game-pieces (often confused with those of Hondecoeter’s cousin Jan Weenix) or the magnificent pictures of live birds most associated with his name.

Melchior d’ Hondecoeter: Peacocks, oil on canvas, 1.902×1.346 m, 1683…Hondecoeter’s mature style owes much to Frans Snyders, the important Flemish animal and still-life painter of a generation earlier, whose work he collected. From him, Hondecoeter borrowed a compositional formula that he used consistently from the late 1660s: birds and animals seen close up in the centre of the canvas, others entering from the left or right, their bodies sometimes cropped by the frame, the middle ground blocked by a wall, fence, tree or architectural ruins across one half of the canvas, the remaining side opening to a distant vista (e.g. Peacocks). Hondecoeter treated the latter in a variety of ways: a hilly landscape, a seascape, an Italianate mansion, the grounds of an estate, a forest or a farmhouse. The primary subject also varied: bird fights, birds being frightened or attacked, birds at rest. A white hen crouching with a chick protected under one wing and other chicks near by was a popular subject, repeated by Hondecoeter many times, for example Hen and her Chicks (c. 1657; Caen, Mus. B.-A.). In variations on this maternal theme, the hen protects her chicks from the feet of clumsy, larger birds, or from an approaching predator, or scolds them for having strayed too far from her.

Hondecoeter also painted what appear to be inventories of animals that focus on rare species, such as the pelican in the Floating Feather (e.g. Amsterdam, Rijksmus.). Noah’s Ark (e.g. Brunswick, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Mus.) and Aesop’s fable the Vain Jackdaw (e.g. The Hague, Mauritshuis) were other favourite subjects, together with occasional works based on popular Dutch proverbs or sayings. There are two extant portraits: Anne Reijnst as a Young Woman (c. 1680–85; Reims, Mus. St Denis) and Johan Ortt on Horseback, one of three equestrian subjects commissioned by Ortt in 1687 (London, Buckingham Pal., Royal Col.). Two splendid and highly unusual allegorical works, traditionally entitled the Emblematic Representations of King William’s Wars, are in Holkham Hall, Norfolk. Both of these depict, in the upper half, battles fought in the air between birds (eagles, storks, herons and hawks), hideous monsters and demon bats, and, in the lower half, naval battles and the wreckage and destruction of war.

Hondecoeter supplied large paintings for the town houses and country mansions of rich Amsterdam burghers. Some are of such extravagant scale and sublime visual quality that they must be counted with the great mural decorations of the 17th century, for example Park with Birds, formerly in a house in Driemond, near Weesp (3.38×5.24 m; now Munich, Alte Pin.).

Hondecoeter does not seem to have made preparatory drawings, and there are few of certain authentication. Instead he recorded birds and animals from life in oil on canvas; he copied these whenever a certain species was required. Although 14 of these modelli were included in the inventory of his studio at the time of his death, only one is known: Birds and Animal Sketches (Lille, Mus. B.-A.), which is covered with detailed studies of 17 birds and a squirrel against a neutral grey ground. From 1668 throughout the rest of his career, Hondecoeter used many of these birds and the squirrel in his paintings, posed exactly as in the model. He habitually repeated entire passages from one painting to another and often made copies of compositions with only minor variations. From his vast output and its occasionally uneven quality, it appears that he was assisted in his studio. A contemporary, Adriaen van Oolen (d 1694), made a small industry of copying Hondecoeter’s paintings, many of which van Oolen signed with his own name. Hondecoeter was also copied in the 18th century by Aert Schouman and many others of lesser skill. His work remained highly popular long after his death; in the 19th century he was known as the ‘Raphael of bird painters’.

Joaneath A. Spicer and Richard C. Mühlberger. "Hondecoeter, d’." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T038750pg2 (accessed May 8, 2012).

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