- 201
Cornelis Biltius The Hague 1653 - after 1685
Description
- Cornelis Biltius
- A game larder with a hare, partridge, snipe,a turkey , a side of meat, capons, starlings, pike, eel and fish with a parrot;A game larder still life with pigeons, a hare, mallard, calf's head, asparagus, lobster and trout with a hawk and a plover
- the former signed lower left: C. Bilcius fecit
the latter signed lower right: Cornelis Bilcius - a pair, both oil on canvas
Provenance
Thence by descent until sold ("Die Sammlung der Markgrafen und Grossherzöge von Baden"), Baden-Baden, Sotheby's, 13 October 1995, lot 2306.
Catalogue Note
Biltius was born in The Hague, the eldest son of the game still life painter Jacobus Biltius, whom he followed, presumably as pupil, to Maastricht and Antwerp. Thereafter he seems to have been peripatetic, and was active in many parts of Germany, including Cologne, Bonn, Ehrenbreitstein near Koblenz, and later in FRanconia, at Nuremberg and Bamberg or Würzburg. Evidence for his activity is sometimes supplied by the inscriptions on his trompe l'oeil paintings, and by little else1. Not surprisingly, his characteristic game still lifes regular emerge, as did this pair, from old German noble collections.
1 See for example the Quodlibet trompe l'oeil incorporating numerous inscriptions on letters and printed matter in Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, inv. Gm 1373; see A. Tacke, Die Gemälde des 17. Jahrhunderts im Germanischen Nationalmuseum, Mainz 1995, pp. 41-3, no. 13, reproduced and colour plate 11.