Bird's Concert

The subject is an old fable. An owl on a branch holds an open score and the rest of the birds sing under its direction, a joke about noise passing for music that Flemish painters repeated for a century. What makes this version worth standing in front of is the roll call. Snyders worked in Antwerp around 1630, a port taking in ships from the Indies and the Americas, and among the jays, waxwings and hoopoes anybody could see in Brabant he set a bird of paradise from New Guinea and a blue-fronted amazon from South America. He painted the theme more than once. Other versions hang in Madrid and Cape Town. This canvas reached Russia in 1779, when Catherine the Great bought the whole Walpole collection out of Houghton Hall, to loud complaint in London.