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Jacob Maris, 'A Girl feeding a Bird in a Cage', about 1867

Key facts
Full title A Girl feeding a Bird in a Cage
Artist Jacob Maris
Artist dates 1837 - 1899
Date made about 1867
Medium and support oil on wood
Dimensions 32.6 × 20.8 cm
Inscription summary Signed
Acquisition credit Sir Hugh Lane Bequest, 1917, The National Gallery, London. In partnership with Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.
Inventory number NG3261
Location On loan: Long Loan to The Hugh Lane (2019 - 2031), Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin, Ireland
Collection Main Collection
A Girl feeding a Bird in a Cage
Jacob Maris
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This small painting on wood was painted in the same year as A Girl Seated outside a House, also in the National Gallery’s collection. The two paintings have several common features. These include a young girl (probably the same model) wearing jewellery, seen in profile on the right of the picture, a town with a church spire and even sunflowers in almost identical positions.

Maris reused many of these elements in another painting, Girl Knitting on a Balcony, Montmartre (Gemeentemuseum, The Hague). Painted two years later in 1869, this larger picture, showing the girl full length, also includes a caged bird.

Although Maris belonged to The Hague School of realist painters, it is tempting to see a symbolic aspect to the image of a caged bird (such as loss of freedom) or perhaps a reference to eighteenth-century portraits of girls with birds by French artists such as Greuze.

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A Beach
A Beach
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This beach may be at Scheveningen, close to The Hague, where Jacob Maris settled in the 1870s. A lone fisherman appears to be hauling nets alongside two beached flat-bottomed fishing boats. A few birds are the only sign of wildlife.Maris painted the scene, particularly the sky, with broad visible...
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A Drawbridge in a Dutch Town
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The everyday quality of this simple functional bridge may have particularly appealed to Jacob Maris, and he paints it without embellishment or narrative incident. He also made a watercolour of the same view in 1875, but in this oil painting he emphasises the bridge’s monumentality by increasing t...
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A Girl seated outside a House
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When this small painting on wood was bequeathed to the National Gallery it had the title Vespers, although it had previously been titled Young Girl with Flowers. The composition is very similar to a picture titled Sunday Afternoon, which Jacob Maris had painted a few years earlier in 1863. That p...
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A Windmill and Houses beside Water: Stormy Sky
A Windmill and Houses beside Water: Stormy Sky
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A Young Woman nursing a Baby
A Young Woman nursing a Baby
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Three Windmills
Three Windmills
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Born in The Hague, Jacob Maris trained at the city’s Drawing Academy and at the Academy in Antwerp. His interest in specifically Dutch landscape perhaps began on his first visit in 1859 to the artists’ colony at the village of Oosterbeek. After travelling in northern Europe, Jacob moved to Paris...
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