A Buzzard Attacking Two Ducks

c. 1652

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 50.5 cm × width 56.8 cm
outer size: depth 5 cm (support incl. SK-L-2188)

Technical notes

Support The support consists of two vertically grained oak planks (approx. 21 and 35.8 cm), approx. 1.4-0.7 cm thick. The reverse is bevelled on all sides and has a pounced mark of a six-pointed star, assigned to an anonymous panel maker in Antwerp. There are two gouges and a hole (now filled) at the top centre, the latter possibly used for hanging the painting. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1625. The panel could have been ready for use by 1636, but a date in or after 1642 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, solid, brownish-yellow ground extends slightly over the edges of the support. It emits a strong orange-yellow fluorescence in UV light.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The composition was built up from light to dark. The sky consists of a single layer of thick, white, pastose paint with large, blue pigment particles. The clouds were worked in thickly and wet in wet, and the trees were executed on top of the sky. The lower landscape was underpainted in a light grey and covered with compositional elements. Infrared photography and stereomicroscopy revealed a large alteration in the centre of the composition, in the area of the buzzard and the seized duck. It seems that forms were removed here, together with the (light grey) underpaint and the ground – leaving only remnants of the latter in the interstices of the wood grain –, to make room for the two birds. The bare wood is still visible here and there, for example under the duck’s body and left wing. Other areas were thinned by scraping, perhaps to create the watery patches of the marsh as can be seen, for example, in the area of the plant in the bottom left corner. Stereomicroscopy showed that the duck on the left was built up over a greyish, dark undermodelling. Highlights in the feathers and leaves were added with small, pastose brushstrokes at the end. Vague, dark forms visible in some areas of the water indicate numerous changes, and could not be identified either with the naked eye or with infrared photography.
Gwen Tauber, 2024

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: G. Tauber / W. de Ridder, RMA, 28 January 1998
infrared photography: G. Tauber, RMA, 3 June 2009
paint samples: G. Tauber, RMA, nos. SK-A-2682/1-2, 3 June 2009
technical report: G. Tauber / G. Wuestman, RMA, 3 June 2009
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 2 May 2010
dendrochronology: M. Domínguez Delmás, RMA, 31 October 2022

Condition

Poor. A vertical crack runs across the entire height of the panel at approx. 14.5 cm from the right. The support was once stabilized with a canvas patch, as indicated by glue residues on the reverse, and is now reinforced with four wooden blocks glued to the top and bottom. The tips of the top right and bottom left corners are missing, and there are cracks in the outer side of both planks and along the join. There are numerous pinpoint paint losses throughout and the varnish is very discoloured.

Conservation

conservator unknown, 1914: varnished

Provenance

…; ? sale, London (E. Foster), 12 February 1834, no. 56, as Wijntrack (‘A Landscape with Hawk and Ducks’), £1 6s, to Her(r)man;¹…; sale, London (Christie’s), 17 June 1912, no. 101, as Wijntrack, £3 13s 6d, to Baron Rudolph Theodorus van Pallandt van Eerde (1868-1913), Huis Eerde, Ambt-Ommen;² by whom bequeathed to the museum, as Wijntrack, with 9 other paintings and 46 prints, July 1913

Object number: SK-A-2682

Credit line: R.T., Baron van Pallandt van Eerde Bequest

The artist

Dirck Wijntrack (Heusden before c. 1618 - The Hague 1678)

It is known from two documents of 1640 in which Dirck Wijntrack is referred to as a ‘bachelor from Heusden’ that he came from that small town near Den Bosch. He was probably born before 1618 because he was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church and his name does not occur in its baptismal records, which go back to that year. He is first registered in Rotterdam in 1640 and that is probably where he trained. He may have studied with Cornelis Saftleven, for his earliest extant paintings, such as the interior of a barn of 1638,³ display an affinity with the latter’s work. Wijntrack married Aeltgen IJsbrants van Beaumont on 30 December 1640 and thereafter surfaces several times in the Rotterdam archives. She died during or shortly after the birth of a son in 1643, and a year later the artist wedded Geertruyt Pietersdr Montagne, a sister of the later wife of the artist Ludolf de Jongh. Wijntrack lived in Gouda for a while in the early 1650s, and possibly also in nearby Schoonhoven, which was Geertruyt’s birthplace. There is a document of 1651 in which he authorized his brother-in-law to collect money for him from the Rotterdam painter-dealer François Dircksz van Grevenbroeck.

Once again widowed, Wijntrack seems to have exchanged his work as an artist for a career in the civil service. In 1657 he was appointed ‘Clerk to the Secretary of the Noble, Most Mighty States of Holland and West Friesland’. He is mentioned several times in the Hague archives in the 1660s and ’70s. Wijntrack married for the third time in 1662, and in 1670 he fell ill and made his last will. He died eight years later. A large number of his paintings, among them landscapes with waterfowl, foxes, rabbits and other animals, are listed as being in the estate of his son-in-law in 1686.

Wijntrack specialized in animals, which he depicted by the waterside or in farmyards, and was particularly fond of waterfowl. He also made a few interiors of barns and kitchens, and supplied the staffage for several extant works by Joris van der Haagen. Wijntrack also collaborated with Jan Wijnants. There are no known paintings after 1654, and his last dated one is a farmyard with waterfowl signed jointly by him and Wijnants.⁴

Gerdien Wuestman, 2024

References
J.A. Gerlach Jr, Oorsprong, geschiedenis en tegenwoordige toestand van het collegie van oude schutters van den voetboog van St. Joris en der jonge Colveniers schutters te Heusden, met de afbeelding van hunne gedenkstukken, Groningen 1862; Bredius in A.D. de Vries, A. Bredius and S. Muller, Catalogus der schilderijen in het Museum Kunstliefde te Utrecht, coll. cat. 1885, pp. 100-01; A. Bredius, ‘Het schildersregister van Jan Sysmus, Stads-Doctor van Amsterdam’, Oud Holland 13 (1895), pp. 112-20, esp. pp. 115-17; P. Haverkorn van Rijsewijk, ‘Ludolf (Leuff) de Jongh’, Oud Holland 14 (1896), pp. 36-46, esp. pp. 38-39; A. von Wurzbach, Niederländisches Künstler-Lexikon, II, Leipzig/Vienna 1910, p. 910; A. Bredius, Künstler-Inventare, II, The Hague 1916, pp. 582-84; M.J.F.W. van der Haagen, ‘De samenwerking van Joris van der Haagen en Dirck Wijntrack’, Oud Holland 35 (1917), pp. 43-48; A. Bredius, Künstler-Inventare, VII, The Hague 1921, p. 289; U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXXVI, Leipzig 1947, p. 334; Buijsen in E. Buijsen et al., Haagse schilders in de Gouden Eeuw: Het Hoogsteder Lexicon van alle schilders werkzaam in Den Haag 1600-1700, exh. cat. The Hague (Haags Historisch Museum) 1998-99, pp. 268-69; G. Wuestman, ‘Nieuwe biografische gegevens over Dirck Wijntrack (Heusden in of vóór 1618-1678 Den Haag)’, Oud Holland 123 (2010), pp. 78-79; Bredius notes, RKD

Entry

Two domesticated ducks are being attacked by what seems to be a buzzard.⁵ One has been caught but the other escapes. The scene is not very realistic, because buzzards mainly eat carrion and small animals and would not choose to go after live waterfowl.⁶ The poses of the assailant and its victim also look very unnatural. Depictions of this kind, with ducks and swans being seized by birds of prey, are not uncommon in Wijntrack’s oeuvre. He was one of the first practitioners of this subgenre in the Dutch Republic.⁷

The composition is similar to that of Fox Hunting Ducks dated 1652 in Utrecht, a colossal canvas signed by both Wijntrack and Joris van der Haagen.⁸ It has also been thought that the latter was responsible for the landscape in the present painting,⁹ but, although the type is vaguely similar to those by Van der Haagen, the quality is so inferior as to rule out such an attribution.¹⁰ However, it is likely that the background is indeed by an artist other than Wijntrack.

The bare strip beneath the left wing of the captured duck suggests that the birds were executed after the landscape. What makes that so interesting is that there is at least one other instance in which the opposite is the case in a joint work by Wijntrack and Van der Haagen.¹¹ Technical examination of the Rijksmuseum picture has revealed that paint was scraped off down to the bare wood of the panel on the right to create a space for the buzzard and its prey,¹² but the severely yellowed varnish and the many areas of damage and retouching make it impossible to say for certain at what stage this was done, nor whether the escaping duck was also added after the landscape. It is noteworthy, too, that that bird is far truer to life than the two others, but the differences seem to be too minor to conclude that the latter group is by another hand.

Wijntrack’s scenes of birds and waterfowl are placed between 1643 and 1654. The year of 1652 on the Utrecht Fox Hunting Ducks provides a reference point for this undated work, which would have been made around the same time.

Gerdien Wuestman, 2024

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

M.J.F.W. van der Haagen, ‘De samenwerking van Joris van der Haagen en Dirck Wijntrack’, Oud Holland 35 (1917), pp. 43-48, esp. p. 44 (the landscape as by Joris van der Haagen); J.K. van der Haagen, De schilders van der Haagen en hun werk: Met catalogus van de schilderijen en teekeningen van Joris van der Haagen, Voorburg 1932, p. 117, no. 268 (the attribution of the background to Van der Haagen doubted)

Collection catalogues

1914, p. 548, no. 2739a (the landscape probably by Joris van der Haagen); 1976, p. 618, no. A 2682 (as Wijntrack)

Citation

Gerdien Wuestman, 2024, 'Dirck Wijntrack and anonymous, A Buzzard Attacking Two Ducks, 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.6569

(accessed 6 January 2025 14:15:02).