Aert Schouman

For a room in Huis ten Bosch, the palace in The Hague, Aert Schouman painted canvas wall hangings full of birds. The commission came from Willem V, the prince of Orange who led the Dutch Republic as stadholder. Among the trees of a Dutch park stand a secretary bird, a trumpeter and a sunbittern. Schouman knew these birds from life. From 1765 he drew in the prince's menagerie and natural history cabinet, and he usually laid the watercolour straight onto the paper, with little or no drawing beneath.

Birds came late in his career. Schouman was born in Dordrecht in 1710, a skipper's son, and at 15 became the apprentice of Adriaen van der Burg, a painter in the same town. For years his work was portraits, biblical and mythological scenes and whole painted rooms for wealthy households. He also dealt in pictures, buying works by Aelbert Cuyp, the Dordrecht landscape painter, by the genre painter Jan Steen and by Rubens. His account books from 1733 onward record what he made and what he sold.

In 1753 he settled for good in The Hague, where he was then dean of the painters' society Pictura, a post he held until 1762. He died there in July 1792, four years after a stroke, and was buried at Ter Navolging, a cemetery in the dunes near Scheveningen.