Artist: Gijsbert Gillisz De Hondecoeter (The Younger)
Date: 1652
Size: 58 x 102 cm
Technique: Oil On Panel
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
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