RIJKS Museum Amsterdam

TheTamshee: had some time to spare at Amsterdam airport today so I visited the RIJKS museum to check out the fine work of Melchior d' Hondecoeter (1636-1695) "Bird Painter"
Seven paintings were on display by the most renowned Dutch painter of the 17th century. Hondecoeter seems to capture the birds in a snapshot, as if they could seemingly fly away at any moment. He painted still lifes of game bags with dead birds, poultry yards with chickens as the main focus and park landscapes with exotic birds. The paintings featured geese (Brent, Egyptian and Red-Breasted), partridges, doves, sparrows, Golden Orioles, peacocks, but also African Black-Crowned Cranes, Australian Yellow-Crested Cockatoos, Asian Sarus Cranes and even an Indonesian Purple-Naped Lory and two Grey-Headed Lovebirds from Madagascar. The paintings show the animals interacting with one another, engaging in exciting confrontations.
"Hondecoeter’s fame reached a pinnacle with several paintings commissioned by Stadholder-King William III during the last quarter of the 17th century with the most famous being a pelican and other birds near a pool, known as "The Floating Feather" (1680) but this is not "my favourite, his dipiction of the menace of Eagles attacking poultry (1673) on display at the Musee du Louvre, in Paris is more to my liking. Poultry is not the usual prey for white-tailed eagles, which mainly hunt for fish, waterfowl and mammals by the water's edge, or steal food from other birds of prey. As a result, eagles only appear a few times in his oeuvre.