The Flemish Cock and the Turkish Cock

Entry

The Flemish Cock and the Turkish Cock is evidently the work of two hands; the distant landscape and burning farmhouse were added after the foreground poultry.

The picture was first catalogued as attributed to the Dordrecht master Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691), an attribution that was rejected by Hofstede de Groot, who identified it as Flemish. Nearly every animal painter in the southern Netherlands in the seventeenth century followed Frans Snyders (1579-1657) in depicting fighting poultry.² The landscape backgrounds are uniformly south Netherlandish, apart from those of David de Coninck (1636-1699) when he was working in Italy. The farmhouse in the present work is Italianate, but this forms no basis for an attribution to De Coninck, whose handling is solider and more assured. The attribution of both the landscape and the birds remains as yet unknown; it seems best therefore to describe it as likely to have been painted in the southern Netherlands, circa 1650.

Specifically illustrated here is Edewaerd de Dene’s fable ‘Vlaemsche ende Turcksche Haen’ published in his anthology De warachtighe fabulen de dieren, Bruges 1567, in which the cock attacks the turkey for invading its territory; the fable was first identified by Arnout Balis in 1985 as depicted by Jan Fyt (1611-1661, active in Antwerp from 1641) in his picture at the Brussels Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België (inv. no. 4420).³ The configuration of the two birds relates quite closely with that in the signed painting by the Antwerp-based Paul de Vos (1595-1678) in Warsaw⁴ as was recently made clear by Thomas Balfe in his comprehensive review of this Aesopic fable by Fyt.⁵

Gregory Martin, 2022