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Giles Hondecoeter, his grandfather, painted live birds admirably, but chiefly cocks and hens in the taste of Savery and Vincaboom.
His best pictures are in England. 'A Calm at Low Water' is in the National Gallery. Melchior de Hondecoeter, born in 1636, died in 1695, chose the feathered tribe for his subjects. He has been called 'the Raphael of bird painters. He painted especially poultry, peacocks, turkeys, and pigeons, which he usually represented alive, and treated with great truthfulness and picturesque feeling.
Melchior was born in 1636, and studied for a time with his father; but meantime his aunt Josina had married Jan Baptist Weenix, and a son was born to them, Jan Weenix, who inherited from old Giles Hondecoeter, his grandfather, his talent for painting poultry, and from his father, Jan Baptist Weenix, he acquired the benefit of several influences which were not shared by his cousin Melchior.
Exuberance, plenty, fatness. As a painter of animals, again, Rubens opened out a new field for the energy of his fellow-countrymen, which was tilled so industriously by Frans Snyders and Jan Fyt, and in a lesser degree by the Dutchmen Jan Weenix, father and son, and Hondecoeter.
JAN WEENIX, who was born at Amsterdam in 1649, though he succeeded in so far assimilating his father's style that his earlier works are often confused with those of "Giovanni Battista," did not acquire the energy or the dramatic force displayed by Melchior Hondecoeter in representing live birds and animals, though he sometimes surpassed him in the finish and the harmony of his decorative arrangements of dead game and still life.
In a poem upon painting by Karel van Mander, who was the first to write the history of the painters of the Netherlands, there occurs a passage directed against drunkenness and the habit of fighting, part of which runs as follows: "Be sober and live so that the unhappy proverb 'As debauched as a painter' may become 'As temperate as an artist." To mention a few among the most famous artists, Mieris was a notable winebibber, Van Goyen a drunkard, Franz Hals, the master of Brouwer, a winesack, Brouwer an incorrigible tippler; William Cornelis, and Hondecoeter were on the best terms with the bottle.
Moreover, as there were three Hondecoeters and two Weenixes who were painters, it is necessary to say something about each of them. MELCHIOR HONDECOETER, the best known, was of an ancient and noble family. He was instructed till the age of seventeen by his father Gysbert, who was a tolerable painter.
I had halted to stare up at a big Hondecoeter that hung in the sunlight over the first short flight of stairs an elaborate "Parliament of Fowls" when the girl turned the handle of a door to my right and entered. "Uncle Peter, here is the gentleman who has called to see you."
The names of Weenix and Hondecoeter are so inseparably associated in the popular mind as painters of birds, whose respective works are not readily distinguishable moreover by the casual observer, that a short excursion into their family histories is advisable, for the purpose of showing how it was that this particular branch of the art was so successfully practised by the two.
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