Dead Cock

Metsu spent his short career on indoor scenes of comfortable Dutch households, and he left very few still lifes. The Prado dates this small panel 1659 to 1660, the years he was living in Amsterdam, where pictures of dead game were selling well, the kind Jan Baptist Weenix and Elias Vonck made, a single bird hung up by one leg and given a whole picture to itself.

For a long time this one seemed to hang against flat black nothing. A recent cleaning took off a thick oxidised varnish and the space came back. The cock hangs from a cord over a table, in a room with an arch behind it, in warm brown and yellow air, and the plumage is brushed loosely over a pale red ground.

Two old numbers, 1551 and 171, are painted along the bottom edge of the panel. They are Spanish royal inventory marks, from the decades the picture spent at Aranjuez before it was sent to the Prado in the 1820s.