Gamepiece with a Dead Heron

1695 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

still-life

This painting belongs to the type of gamepieces called hunting trophy. Jan Weenix was a specialist of these pieces and his delicate pictures dominated the genre in the 1690s and during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. The painting was titled previously as "Falconer's Bag" due to the bag in the foreground.

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About the Artist

Jan Weenix

1642 – 1719

Dutch painter, the son of Jan Baptist Weenix, and was his father's pupil with his cousin Hondecoeter. He never visited Italy, but he painted Italianate scenes like his father's and pursued more single-mindedly the still-life with flowers, animals and dead game subjects which he also took over from his father. He worked mainly in Amsterdam, but also at Bensberg and Düsseldorf for the Elector Palatine, for whom he executed a huge series of still-lifes (1702-12). There are works in Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum), Augsburg, Barnsley, Cape Town, Dresden, The Hague, London, Munich, New York (Metropolitan Museum), Oxford, Paris (Petit Palais), Toronto and elsewhere.

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