Jakob Bogdány

Private collection, New York;

Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby's, 21 May 1998, lot 65;

Where acquired by Jordan and Thomas A. Saunders III.

Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Elegance and Wonder: Masterpieces of European Art from the Jordan and Thomas A. Saunders III Collection, 20 March 2023 - 30 January 2025.

Bogdani specialized in animal painting in an era when many wealthy Europeans paid large sums of money to obtain rare birds and other seemingly exotic animals from the far corners of the globe. As colonial empires were expanding at the turn of the 18th century, the traffic in species from remote locations was just another facet of the general fashion for foreign goods, such as the food and luxury items, that asserted the international pretensions of the ruling classes of Europe.

As an artist who made his career in an international context, Bogdani was truly a man of his time. He was born in Hungary, but he established his reputation as a painter in Amsterdam before relocating to England toward the end of the 1680s. This painting is characteristic of his English period and exhibits a familiarty with the subject matter that was gained by his close study of the colection of exotic birds amassed by the dukes of Marlborough. The inclusion of a macaw from South America and a family of silkie fowls from the Far East points to the fascintaion for the exotic at the dawn of the so-called Enlightened Age.