Lot 56: School of Melchior d'Hondecoeter (Dutch,

School of Melchior d'Hondecoeter (Dutch, 1636-1695), "A Family of Fowl with a Turkey in a Farmyard" and "Two Cocks Fighting Amid Chickens and Peacocks in the Garden of a Domed Villa", c. 1700, oil on wood panel, both unsigned, each with 19th c. framer labels of "Alexander Cooper/ 32 Constitution St./ Leith [Scotland]" en verso of frames, each 12 in. x 15 in., the first in a foliate giltwood frame, the second in a 19th c. cove-molded giltwood frame.
PLEASE NOTE: Provenance: With the collector, Wayne Francis Palmer (1895-1983), Springlake Plantation, Mobile, AL; thence by descent in the Palmer Family. Note: These very beautiful paintings have a jewel-like precision, both of pictorial form and of preservation; they show only widely scattered, small patches of inpaint, as for example three tiny areas on the turkey and a random few in the foliage. They perfectly exemplify a compositional pattern which Hondecoeter used from about 1670 through the remaining quarter-century of his life (and which proved still widely appealing for years after his death): "birds ... seen close up in the centre of the [design], others entering from left or right, their bodies sometimes cropped by the frame, the middle ground blocked by a ... tree or architectural ruins across one half of the [composition], the remaining side opening to a distant vista [of] an Italianate mansion ... or a farmhouse" (Richard C. Mühlberger, The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols., Jane Turner, ed., London 1996, 14:706). Such was the popularity of this 'Raphael of bird painters' that his compositional formulas were very widely repeated for well over a century after his death, though very rarely with the skill and assurance seen in this remarkable pair of paintings (and evidently not by either of the identified followers specifically named by Mühlberger, that is Adriaen van Oolen or Aert Schouman). As one eminent authority on Dutch art has observed, "The broad highlighting of the feathers appears to be unique to the artist of the Palmer paintings." A highly diagnostic change from Hondecoeter's personal technique is the execution of these splendid pictures on wood panels: the originator of the classic pattern painted exclusively on canvas, and at somewhat larger size; this artist's choice of small panels as his pictorial supports insures an even more lustrous finish, and a concentration of the images into the perfect size for 'cabinet pictures.'