Still Life with Dead Birds

In this hunting-trophy painting, Christoffel van den Berghe treated the dead birds as an opportunity to orchestrate a variety of textures, patterns and shapes — showcasing the birds’ colourful feathers and complementing them with his entire still-life repertoire of fruit, flowers and serving pieces. The “game piece” genre generally dates from the 1640s, making this panel of 1624 one of the earliest in the history of Dutch art; few Dutch artists painted such works, perhaps because the market for them was small, since hunting was not practised on a large scale in the northern Netherlands and such paintings were rarely commissioned. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.