Birds in the branches

In the 1630s the bird concert was a favourite joke among Flemish painters. An owl usually conducts from a sheet of music and the other birds sing along, a parody of people making music. This canvas has no owl. Nearly every bird in it is turned to the left, and the Louvre thinks a companion picture once hung on that side with the conductor in it. What remains is the choir. A woodpecker clings to a broken stump, swallows and finches perch up in the branches, a kingfisher opens its beak on a low twig and a parrot hunches at the centre, while two peafowl fill most of the right-hand side. The picture came to the Louvre in 1869 with the bequest of the Paris doctor and collector Louis La Caze, and from 1960 to 1976 it was lent to the Hôtel Matignon, the French prime minister's residence.