Waterfowl

1652

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 57.6 cm × width 102.2 cm
outer size: depth 5.5 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature and date, lower left: GDH 1652

Technical notes

Support The panel consists of three horizontally grained oak planks (approx. 23.9, 10.7 and 21.9 cm), 0.5-0.8 cm thick. Thin wooden strips at the bottom (1 cm) and on the left (0.5 cm) were added at a later date. The reverse has irregular saw marks and plane marks. At some point the support was thinned locally for the application of eight little wooden blocks which were glued on to reinforce the two joins. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1634. The panel could have been ready for use by 1645, but a date in or after 1651 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, off-white ground extends up to the edges of the support.
Underdrawing Infrared photography revealed a rather sketchy underdrawing in a dry medium in the trees in the background, just left of centre, merely giving a rough indication of their position.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. A dark brown and transparent undermodelling with very distinctive brushstrokes can be seen between the leaves of the different plants on the left. The sky was added directly on top of the ground, using a mixture of lead white and greyish-blue pigment particles. The five large birds were reserved in the background, whereas smaller elements, such as the frog and several insects, were painted on top of it. The off-white ground shows through in several areas, most noticeably in the water directly below the ruin.
Zeph Benders, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

infrared photography: Z. Benders, RMA, 19 December 2007
paint samples: Z. Benders, RMA, nos. SK-A-1322/1-2, 19 December 2007
technical report: Z. Benders, RMA, 19 December 2007
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 17 November 2010

Condition

Fair. The middle and bottom planks are not perfectly aligned, as a result of which the compositional elements do not fully coincide. A small part of the composition seems to be missing to the left of this join, most likely caused by planing prior to reglueing the planks. The grain of the wood has become visible in the sky (due to the increased transparency of the paint) and in the foreground and figures (as a result of paint abrasion). The varnish has yellowed.

Conservation

H. Plagge, 1963: treated

Original framing

Ebony scotia frame with flat sight edge. Moulding along the back edge in the form of an ogee¹

Provenance

…; sale, Jonkvrouw Maria Margaretha Snouck van Loosen (1807-1885, Enkhuizen), Enkhuizen (F. Muller), 29 April 1886, no. 24, as dated 1654, fl. 480, to the museum

Object number: SK-A-1322

The artist

Gijsbert Gillisz de Hondecoeter (Utrecht c. 1602/04 - Utrecht 1653)

Gijsbert Gillisz de Hondecoeter was probably born between 1602 and 1604 in Utrecht, for a document of 29 February 1628 from the Orphans’ Chamber states that he was 25 years old at the time, while the inscription on a portrait by Hendrick Bloemaert gives his age as 30 in 1634.² He was one of the nine children of the artist Gillis Claesz de Hondecoeter, and was a son from the latter’s marriage to Mayke Ghysbrechts. The family moved from Utrecht to Amsterdam in 1610, but Gijsbert returned to his native city in or before 1630, when he registered with the local guild. In 1631 he donated a painting to St Job’s Hospital there, and the following year he married Maria Hulstman.

He probably trained with his father. His younger brother Niclaes was also a painter, and his sister Justina was married to the artist Jan Baptist Weenix. His son Melchior d’Hondecoeter (1636-1695), whose apprenticeship to him was cut short by Gijsbert’s death in 1653, went on to become the best-known member of the family.

Gijsbert de Hondecoeter specialized in landscapes and scenes with birds. Many of the former genre are in his father’s manner, and also recall the paintings of Roelant Savery. However, those artists’ typically Flemish landscape style is usually less evident in his oeuvre. Since both Gillis and his son Gijsbert signed with their initials ‘GDH’ and were active in the 1620s and ’30s it is not always clear which work was produced by whom. The earliest dated picture to be attributed to Gijsbert is from 1626,³ but as it includes a dodo, which was one of his father’s specialities, and the style is also more reminiscent of the latter it is more likely that it is in fact by Gillis. The earliest painting bearing the year of execution that was very probably made by Gijsbert is from 1627 and shows poultry and waterfowl.⁴ Since he rarely signed and dated his pictures, it is difficult to trace the chronology and development of his output. There are similarities between Gijsbert’s scenes with aquatic birds and those by Savery and the younger Aelbert Cuyp. His last dated works are from 1652.⁵ Gijsbert de Hondecoeter died in 1653 in Utrecht and was buried there on 29 August.

Marrigje Rikken, 2022

References
A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, III, Amsterdam 1721, pp. 70-71; S. Muller, Schilders-vereenigingen te Utrecht: Bescheiden uit het Gemeente-Archief, Utrecht 1880, p. 157; A. von Wurzbach, Niederländisches Künstler-Lexikon, II, Leipzig/Vienna 1910, pp. 703-04; Schneider in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XVII, Leipzig 1924, p. 432; P. Huys Janssen, Schilders in Utrecht 1600-1700, Utrecht 1990, pp. 91-92; 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. 111; Seelig in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, LXXIV, Munich/Leipzig 2012, p. 381

Entry

Sitting and standing by the waterside are, from left to right, a snow goose, a grey goose, a heron and two ducks. There is another small black bird seen from the back to the right of the grey goose, possibly a shag, which is almost entirely swallowed up by the background. The snow goose is more at home in the high north, but could have arrived in the Netherlands to overwinter. The others are a relatively common sight in the Dutch countryside. The vegetation on the bank and the low horizon also give the landscape a typically Dutch look, but that impression is negated by the classical ruin in the centre and the hills in the background.

The sloping bank enabled Gijsbert de Hondecoeter to spread the birds over the picture surface without overlapping and at the same time without marshalling them into a single stiff, horizontal line. The compositional design, with its suggestion of movement, is found quite frequently in the artist’s scenes with poultry and waterfowl. A similar bank descending to the water’s edge on the right is seen in an undated painting in Budapest.⁶ The oddly shaped tree trunk at top left in Waterfowl very closely resembles the one in that work, while the grey goose has even exactly the same pose. However, there is a greater variety of animals in the Budapest picture, and it is closed off on the right by trees and two deer, whereas in the Rijksmuseum panel there is a panoramic landscape.

Despite the successful design, the present scene lacks some dynamics. The birds are not integrated in their surroundings and show little interaction. They are no less static in another of the artist’s poultry pieces, also dating from 1652, but in that painting De Hondecoeter opted for a different compositional scheme with the chickens overlapping each other.⁷ There is very little suggestion of depth in that work, and the birds, like the ones in the Rijksmuseum’s Waterfowl, have little volume and look two-dimensional.

This generally flat and static appearance is a common feature in paintings of poultry and wildfowl by contemporaries of De Hondecoeter, such as Aelbert Cuyp. Huys Janssen discerned the influence of Roelant Savery in the Rijksmuseum picture, and that artist indeed displays the same characteristics in his work.⁸ Gijsbert’s son, Melchior d’Hondecoeter, was the first to succeed in rendering birds in such a lively and lifelike way that they appear to be snapshots.

Marrigje Rikken, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

P. Huys Janssen, Schilders in Utrecht 1600-1700, Utrecht 1990, p. 92

Collection catalogues

1887, p. 78, no. 657 (as dated 1651); 1903, p. 130, no. 1215; 1934, p. 132, no. 1215; 1960, p. 139, no. 1215; 1976, p. 282, no. A 1322

Citation

Marrigje Rikken, 2022, 'Gijsbert Gillisz. de Hondecoeter, Waterfowl, 1652', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8736

(accessed 22 November 2024 15:14:01).