This picture of a cluster of birds is typical of the work of the Dutch painter Melchior d'Hondecoeter (1636–1695). Hondecoeter was the last of a family of landscape and animal painters in Utrecht and trained with his uncle, Jan Baptiste Weenix. Hondecoeter painted popular still lifes of dead game, but he is most famous as the leading master of the fashionable genre of vogelstuk – the living bird piece. Keeping exotic animals was costly, so paintings that displayed them became a status symbol, even if the owners did not in fact have a menagerie.¹ While his predecessors painted static birds in a landscape, Hondecoeter breathed life into his subjects, giving them realistic, often complex poses. His assortments of wild native and exotic birds interact with one another in carefully choreographed tableaux set in a variety of locations, from farmyards, courtyards and parks to expensive-looking gardens. Occasionally he added other animals to the mix, such as a small dog. These encounters between animals range from benign to more aggressive confrontations, each canvas presenting a snapshot of an unfolding drama.

Hondecoeter did not always sign or date his works, and his pictures were frequently copied and imitated, so it is difficult to reconstruct his stylistic development.² Numerous works attributed to him can be found in British private and public collections, including the Royal Collection (RCIN 405354 and RCIN 402785) and National Gallery (NG1222 and NG202). A number of expanded versions of the Trewithen composition featuring a peacock, peahen, cockerel and hens exist: see, for example a version attributed to the circle of Hondecoeter sold at Christie’s on 14 April 2011 (fig. 1) and a dated original by Hondecoeter in the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg (fig. 2). Hondecoeter made ad vivum sketches of the animals he painted, and a drawing of the peacock and peahen of this composition survives in the Rijksmuseum (fig. 3).³