Geese and Ducks

Under a dark, stormy sky a crowd of geese and ducks gathers in a landscape. Melchior d'Hondecoeter painted it around 1680 as one of a pair with a picture of chickens and ducks, and the two still hang side by side. Their route to The Hague ran through Germany. In the 18th century both hung in Oranienstein, a castle at Diez on the river Lahn that belonged to the Nassau-Diez branch of the House of Orange, where they are recorded in 1726. In 1776 they passed by inheritance to William V, the last stadtholder of the Dutch Republic. When French revolutionary armies overran the Republic in 1795, the two paintings were confiscated and taken to Paris, to the new national museum in the Louvre. They came back after Napoleon's fall in 1815, and in 1822 they moved into the Mauritshuis.