Cock and Hens in a Landscape

The Mauritshuis number of this panel, 405, is the same as the price the Dutch State paid for it, 405 francs. That was at a sale in Paris in May 1876, and the buyer was Victor de Stuers, who the year before had become head of the government's new department of arts and sciences and was buying for the national collections.

The panel came from Neville Davison Goldsmid, an English collector who had lived in The Hague. After his death in 1875 his widow sold his pictures in Paris. Earlier it had passed through the hands of the Hague dealer Dirk Dirksen. The museum gives it no date. It shows a cock and hens in open country, the kind of farmyard subject Gijsbert d'Hondecoeter is best known for. It belongs to the Mauritshuis and hangs in the Gallery Prince Willem V in The Hague.