Concert of the Birds

Don Diego de Mejía, first Marqués de Leganés, was a soldier and a cousin of Olivares, the minister who ran Spain for Philip IV. He owned about 52 paintings by Snyders, one of the largest holdings of the painter anywhere, and four of them were bird concerts. The inventory of his estate, drawn up between 1652 and 1655, lists this canvas as number 60. A stork, an eagle and a red macaw are spread along the branches, singing around a sheet of music, with the big birds holding the two ends of the composition and the smaller ones gathered between them. That arrangement is Snyders's habit rather than anything the subject requires. The Prado dates the picture no more closely than the 17th century, and by 1772 it was hanging in a passageway of the new Royal Palace in Madrid.