The Concert of Birds, signed and dated (on the book of music): M. de Hondecoeter 1670, oil on canvas, 84 x 99 cm, framed

Provenance:
Anonymous sale, Otto Held, Berlin, 5 Dec. 1929, lot 22;
Anonymous sale, Cassirer, Berlin, 29 Sept. 1930, lot 11;
the heirs of Elisabeth Gräfin von Nostitz-Rieneck
Anonymous sale, Dorotheum, Vienna, 24 April 2007, lot 445; 
European private collection. 

Fred Meijer of the RKD, The Hague, endorsed the present painting as an autograph and authentic work by Melchior de Hondecoeter. According to Fred Meijer, the date appearing on the painting fits in with the period when it was created. The theme of a concert of birds was rarely treated by Hondecoeter, and there are only few examples of dated works in Hondecoeter’s oeuvre. Hondecoeter, who was trained by his father, Gysbert, and his uncle, Jan Baptist Weenix, is considered the most important Dutch bird painter of the 17th century. Because of his masterful rendering of the birds’ colourful plumage, be became a model for many of his contemporaries, who called him the “Raphael of Animals”. In Lexikon der Holländischen Stilllebenmaler im 17. Jahrhundert, which appeared in 1995, E. Gemar-Koeltzsch writes about the artist: “Melchior de Hondecoeter painted both indigenous and exotic birds, which in the second half of the 17th century were the pride of wealthy patricians… Apart from roosters and chickens he primarily depicted turkeys, peacocks, swans, pigeons, and ducks, but also pelicans and flamingos, which Hondecoeter rendered in eventful or dramatic scenes. As opposed to the tranquil bird themes by his father, Gysbert de Hondecoeter, Melchior frequently sought to render the climax of a fight or duel, thereby transferring human emotions to the realm of animals. The fragmentary impression of the painter’s compositions, in which objects are seemingly arbitrarily cropped at the margins, is characteristic of these escalating scenes. Similar to snapshots taken with a camera, they suggest the momentariness of a situation. Hondecoeter succeeds in conveying this all the more intensively, the more he approximates the vanishing point to the eye level of the birds depicted – a device frequently employed by him. In this way, the painter manages to directly involve the spectator into the drama of the scene...” 

The present Concert of Birds is not so much marked by drama and daring than by ornithological knowledge and elegance. It is known that Hondecoeter painted his animals from life. He was able to study exotic birds in the aviaries of his patrician and aristocratic patrons. In his book Stillleben, Die niederländischen und deutschen Meister (Stuttgart-Zurich 1988, p. 176), Claus Grimm writes about the painter: “Melchior de Hondecoeter was a specialist in animal depictions who frequently populated large-sized park landscapes with peacocks, swans, ducks, and other species of birds. Besides his popular poultry yards, he also painted still lifes featuring shot wildfowl. Contrary to the smooth paintings by his cousin, Jan Weenix, his compositions are painted with a powerful brush, and light is employed to enhance the vigorous colour accents. Different from Mignon’s analyzing studies, Hondecoeter works with unusual silhouettes achieved through foreshortening, which he then arranges within contrasting sequences of colour impressions…”

In the present painting, Melchior de Hondecoeter once again turns out to be virtually unrivalled in the art of bird painting. He was the only painter of the 17th century who succeeded in rendering the plumage of his models, whether smaller or larger, with such realism and accuracy and with such a blaze of colour.

Provenance:
Anonymous sale, Otto Held, Berlin, 5 Dec. 1929, lot 22;
Anonymous sale, Cassirer, Berlin, 29 Sept. 1930, lot 11;
Coll. Elisabeth Gräfin von Nostitz-Rieneck, widow of the late Mr von Morawitz, née von Mercy, Prague;
the