Melchior d'Hondecoeter

After the start of his career, he painted virtually exclusively bird subjects, usually exotic or game, in park-like landscapes.

Notable are Jackdaw deprived of his Borrowed Plumes (1671), at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, of which Earl Cadogan has an authentic copy; Game and Poultry and A Spaniel hunting a Partridge (1672), in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium; A Park with Poultry (1686) at the Hermitage of St Petersburg.

Stadtholder William III employed Hondecoeter, in great favour with the magnates of the Dutch Republic, to paint his menagerie at Het Loo, and the picture, now at The Hague museum, shows that he could at a pinch overcome the difficulty of representing India's cattle, elephants and gazelles.

He was followed by or influenced D. Birrius, Peter Casteels (III), Adriaen van Oolen, Felice Boselli, Angelo Maria Crivelli, Tobias Stranover, Charles Collins (c. 1680-1744), Marmaduke Cradock, Adriaen Coorte, Jan van Huysum, and Elias Vonck.

[4] His masterpieces are at The Hague, Soestdijk and at Amsterdam (The Floating Feather), but there are fine examples in the Wallace Collection and Belton House in England, and in the public galleries of Berlin, Budapest, Caen, Cologne, Copenhagen, Detroit, Dresden, Dublin, Florence, Glasgow, Hanover, Karlsruhe, Kassel, London, Lyon, Lille, Melbourne, Montpellier, Munich, Paris, Poltava, Riga, Rotterdam, Rouen, Stuttgart, Schwerin, Vaduz, Warsaw and Vienna.

The largest Hondecoeter exhibition to date was held in Berlin in 2010, where 18 of his works were shown at the Neue Nationalgalerie as part of Willem de Rooij's installation 'Intolerance'.

[5] His painting 'A Pelican and other Birds near a Pool’, otherwise known as ‘The Floating Feather’ (c. 1680), was used by William Doyle (musician) for the cover of his album Great Spans of Muddy Time.