Melchior d'Hondecoeter, 'A Cock, Hens and Chicks', about 1668-70

A cockerel struts pompously, parading in front a little flock of hens, its red-feathered chest puffed out and its magnificent tail feathers outlined against the sky. A low sun catches the brilliant white plumage of the sitting hen; another, pale gold, looks up at the cockerel. One hen tips forward to join the many multi-coloured chicks pecking at the ground. A tiny black chick comes running, wings spread, beak open as it cheeps. The chickens are probably Polish – in spite of their name, a breed first recorded in the Netherlands and established there by the seventeenth century. They were bred for their eggs, as well as for their many colours and eccentric, extravagant appearance.

Melchior d‘Hondecoeter specialised in large, decorative paintings of birds, often mixing domestic and ornamental fowl with wild ones, as he does in this picture. A wild pigeon perches on a wooden yoke that leans against an overturned wicker basket, while a finch wings its way towards it. The artist was known for his delicate depiction of feathers of all textures, displayed to the full here in the fluffy feathers of the hens and chicks, the stiffer wing feathers of the adult birds and the pigeon’s tail, the spiky crown on the cockerel and his softly curving tail, black but shot with purple and green.

Such a picture would have been highly prized for its exact and detailed representation of the fowl but also as an idealised view of life on a farm. The backgrounds in d’Hondecoeter’s paintings, like this one, very often show ancient, sometimes ruinous, buildings against a distant landscape of mountains and tall trees more likely to be found near the Mediterranean than in Holland. He wasn‘t interested in the lowly farmyards or everyday poultry shown by other Dutch artists (see Isack van Ostade’s A Farmyard, for example). Melchior d’Hondecoeter’s birds always appear as beautifully kept prize specimens, though not always as well behaved as these ones. The little chick running into the extreme left of this picture also appears in another of his works (Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe), in which two Polish cockerels are shown in a fierce battle over a hen.

Although d‘Hondecoeter drew and sketched from life, he painted in the studio – common practice among seventeenth-century Dutch artists. When he died, a gibbet-like contraption was found there, suggesting that he also worked from birds preserved by taxidermy, a means of preparing, stuffing and mounting the skins of animals with a lifelike effect. The gibbet would have supported the bird for display, but whether d’Hondecoeter practised taxidermy himself, we don't know.