As the seventeenth-century art market in the Netherlands was probably the most flourishing in the whole world, with a giant demand as well as production, Dutch artists increasingly started to specialize in certain types and genres. For churches Pieter Saenredam was the specialist, when you needed a seascape, you’d ask Willem van de Velde or Ludolf Bakhuizen, for still lifes with flowers you needed Jan Davidsz. De Heem, etcetera.
The artist anyone in that period would take, when he or she liked to have a painting filled with exotic birds, was undoubtedly Melchior d’Hondecoeter. Hondecoeter (ca. 1636 – 1695) was descendant of a Utrecht-based family of painters. He was famous for the liveliness of his animal paintings; the birds really seem to move and communicate, while his colleagues mainly depicted dead birds, for example as hunting trophies.
Hondecoeter’s motley works were bought by merchants and other wealthy burghers that could appreciate his fine texture and splendid use of colours. They might have thought that Hondecoeter’s works added a certain aristocratic ‘touch’ to their interiors as well. The picture we look at here, named after the little feather floating on the pond in the painting, was in fact owned by a true aristocrat, namely stadtholder (and later king of England) William III of Orange and his wife Mary Stuart, who probably, around 1680, commissioned it to decorate their palace Het Loo.
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