Still Life with a Hare, a Heron and Other Birds

c. 1645 - c. 1652

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 100 cm × width 92.5 cm
outer size: depth 10 cm (support incl. SK-L-2173)

Inscriptions

signature, lower right, on the edge of the table: Elias Vonck. fe

Technical notes

Support The plain-weave canvas has been wax-resin lined. All tacking edges have been removed. Two strips of paper tape at the edges of the canvas, one covering the other, could indicate an earlier lining. The edges of the picture plane, once folded over a smaller stretcher to serve as tacking edges, were returned to the front when the canvas was transferred onto on a larger stretcher.
Preparatory layers The double ground extends up to the current edges of the canvas. The first layer is a solid red and is followed by a grey layer consisting of carbon black and white pigment. The ground is covered by an imprimatura in the colour of raw umber.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the current edges of the canvas. The dark background was executed first, leaving a generous reserve for the compositional elements. The composition was built up with smooth and opaque paints, and warm transparent brown glazes for the shadows in the hare. The imprimatura has been left exposed in the area between the upper edge of the heron’s neck and the other birds. The soft texture of the hare’s fur and the individual feathers of the birds were suggested with fine lines created by dragging the still-wet paint with a dry stiff brush, laying bare the underlayer. The edges of the reserve were closed with the paint of the background. Details, such as the feet of the birds, were added last.
Michel van de Laar, 2024

Scientific examination and reports

paint samples: M. van de Laar, RMA, no. SK-A-1951/1, 12 March 2008
technical report: M. van de Laar, RMA, 12 March 2008
paint samples: M. van de Laar, RMA, no. SK-A-1951/2, 3 April 2008

Condition

Poor. The adhesion of the lining canvas is problematic at the edges. There are disturbing, old, repaired holes and tears, some of the latter out of plane. Strips of facing paper used during lining have left an imprint in the paint surface. There are unfinished, discoloured retouchings throughout. The paint is abraded locally in the background. The varnish is very discoloured.

Conservation

J.A. Hesterman, 1905: canvas lined

Provenance

…; from the dealer Franz Kleinberger, Paris, fl. 400, to the museum, April 1901

Object number: SK-A-1951

The artist

Elias Vonck (? Amsterdam c. 1600/05 - Amsterdam 1652)

An Amsterdam document of June 1626 mentions one Elias Vonck as being a former cadet on a ship to Brazil. It is suspected that this was the artist, who was evidently a keen traveller in his youth. His date of birth is unknown. In 1631 he is recorded in Toruń in Poland, where his son Jan was born. He was probably already active as a painter at the time, for the inventory of the estate of the Rotterdam artist Maerten Adriaensz Balkeneynde drawn up in January 1631 lists a canvas by ‘Vonck of Amsterdam’. A daughter of his was born in Amsterdam in 1639, and he spent the rest of his life in the city. Krzysztof Tretkowski, who came from Poland and was his assistant in 1642, stated in that year that Vonck boarded with someone in 1639, was often drunk and produced very little.

The name of Vonck’s teacher is not known. Like Frans Snijders from Antwerp, he specialized in game still lifes, being the first artist in the northern Netherlands to do so. His earliest dated paintings, a still life of dead birds and a kitchen scene, are from 1640,¹ and his latest one is from 1652. Two distinguishing features of Vonck’s oeuvre are the unmistakable calligraphed signatures and the large scale. A fine example of this is the Still Life of Dead Game upon a Table, including a Swan, Bittern, Boar, Peacock and Kingfisher, Various Game Birds and a Hare together with Three Hounds, a canvas which measures no less than 190 x 277 centimetres and shows all the animals in their natural size.² The idea put forward by Van Eynden and Van der Willigen and repeated by many other authors that Vonck painted the birds in canvases by Jacob van Ruisdael cannot be confirmed. He was buried in Amsterdam on 10 June 1652. His son Jan carried on his work by also specializing in game pieces.

Erlend de Groot, 2024

References
R. van Eynden and A. van der Willigen, Geschiedenis der vaderlandsche schilderkunst, sedert de helft der XVIII eeuw, I, Haarlem 1816, p. 226; A. von Wurzbach, Niederländisches Künstler-Lexikon, II, Leipzig/Vienna 1910, p. 811; A. Bredius, Künstler-Inventare, I, The Hague 1915, p. 87; ibid., V, 1918, p. 1607; U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXXIV, Leipzig 1940, p. 540; A. van der Willigen and F.G. Meijer, A Dictionary of Dutch and Flemish Still-Life Painters Working in Oils, 1525-1725, Leiden 2003, p. 209

Entry

Elias Vonck’s paintings are generally categorized as game still lifes, a genre that emerged in Flanders in the 1610s, its most notable exponent being Frans Snijders.³ However, scenes that combine true game, such as a hare, with a heron and smaller birds had little to do with hunting, and would above all have conjured up an image of fine and expensive consumer items.⁴ According to Sullivan, finches were regarded as delicacies, which is why they feature so often in still lifes, but aesthetic considerations probably also played a part in Vonck’s choice of specific birds.⁵ What is particularly striking here is that he depicted some of the most colourful species to be found in the Netherlands: a robin and a finch on the left and a kingfisher in the middle of the table edge. It is unclear how many and which birds are in the heap on the right; there is what seems to be a partridge lying at the bottom. The impasted passages of yellow ochre, green-blue, pink and deep blue form a strong contrast with the otherwise monochrome palette.

Although the lack of dated paintings makes it difficult to follow Vonck’s stylistic development, the Rijksmuseum still life is probably not from the beginning of his career. Early works of the 1640s are smaller in scale and do not have such strong contrasts of light and shade.⁶

The subject of a hare with a few large and numerous small birds is a recurrent one in the artist’s oeuvre.⁷ Here he was following an older visual tradition that originated in sixteenth-century Flemish market and kitchen pieces. For example, in Joachim Bueckelaer’s 1566 Well-Stocked Kitchen, with Jesus in the House of Martha and Mary in the Background in the Rijksmuseum, there is a string of finches beside a dead hare in the right foreground.⁸ A late-sixteenth-century print by Peeter van der Borcht shows a man at a vegetable market carrying a hare and a bunch of woodpigeons, while a series of hunting scenes after Johannes Stradanus, first published by Philips Galle in Antwerp in 1578, depicts figures with bunches of finches.⁹ Snijders and later game specialists also employed these motifs on many occasions.

Erlend de Groot, 2024

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

S.A. Sullivan, The Dutch Gamepiece, Totowa 1984, p. 25; E. Gemar-Koeltzsch, Holländische Stillebenmaler im 17. Jahrhundert, III, Lingen 1995, pp. 1059-61, no. 420/3

Collection catalogues

1904, p. 288, no. 2581; 1934, p. 306, no. 2581; 1976, pp. 585-86, no. A 1951

Citation

Erlend de Groot, 2024, 'Elias Vonck, Still Life with a Hare, a Heron and Other Birds, c. 1645 - c. 1652', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6475

(accessed 23 September 2024 00:34:27).