A hunting still life with a partridge, a pheasant and finches, together with a hunting sack and a powderflask on a stone ledge

Melchior d’Hondecoeter is celebrated as the leading bird painter in the Dutch 17th century. He worked by making ad vivum oil sketches of birds captured in various poses, from which he would later populate his paintings, painted with high accuracy of observation. The present painting is a rather early example of d’Hondecoeter’s technique and reveals predominantly the influence of his uncle Jan Baptist Weenix, with whom, besides his father Gijsbert Gillisz. de Hondecoeter, Melchior trained. The picture is very likely to be dated to the 1660s and reveals compositional devices favoured by the artist at that time, when he was also influenced by the work of Frans Snyders, whose paintings he collected.

A comparable still life with game, also on canvas and with an almost identical positioning of the partridge, is in the National Museum in Gdańsk and dated to circa 1663.

Professor Dr Albert Blankert is a renowned art historian in the field of the Dutch Golden Age. During his academic tenure in Utrecht, and as professor at Yale, Cambridge and in Leiden, he has contributed profoundly to our knowledge of Dutch Italianized and Caravaggist painters, Rembrandt and Dutch classicism in the 17th century. Foremost, prof dr Blankert is among the most authoritative Johannes Vermeer scholars and has written extensively on Vermeer's art and Dutch painting.