Lot Essay
Predominantly a landscape painter, Salomon van Ruysdael painted several still lifes of dead birdsin his old age. Seven have come down to us (Stechow, op.cit n.s606A, 607-612), all dated between 1659-1662. Stechow reads the date of the present lot as 1659.
The majority of his still lifes shows birds in wicker baskets. In all of them a roughly hewn marble ledge is depicted, a feature that E. Plietzsch, Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, 1916, p.137, connected with the information provided by Houbraken that the artist had invented an artificial marble substance.
His still lifes do not have direct forerunners in Haarlem painting. They rather are related, as is pointed out by Stechow, op.cit., p.30, to the bird still lifes of Cornelis Lelienbergh working in The Hague and the young Willem van Aelst from Delft, working since 1657 in Amsterdam.
The majority of his still lifes shows birds in wicker baskets. In all of them a roughly hewn marble ledge is depicted, a feature that E. Plietzsch, Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, 1916, p.137, connected with the information provided by Houbraken that the artist had invented an artificial marble substance.
His still lifes do not have direct forerunners in Haarlem painting. They rather are related, as is pointed out by Stechow, op.cit., p.30, to the bird still lifes of Cornelis Lelienbergh working in The Hague and the young Willem van Aelst from Delft, working since 1657 in Amsterdam.