The Concert of Birds

A little owl sits on the branch at the centre with a sheet of music held between its feet, and 15 other kinds of bird are ranged around it. Pictures like this had a job in the house. The Prado notes that bird concerts were painted to hang above a door, a window or a fireplace in northern European homes, and that the fashion reached Spain later. Snyders made this one in 1629 or 1630, in an Antwerp that had been back at war since 1621 and whose painters lived largely on what they could export. What the birds mean has never settled. The museum records one reading as the sense of Hearing and another as the concerted order of nature. On the score a few words can still be made out, though the music itself is unreadable.