Aert Schouman

As the recent encyclopaedic exhibition of his work richly demonstrated¹, Aert Schouman was a talented, prolific and versatile artist, working across many genres and artistic disciplines, including portraiture, landscapes, wall decorations, paintings, drawings and prints. He is, though, perhaps best known for his detailed studies of animals and birds, many of them drawn from specimens that he observed at Royal and aristocratic menageries and natural history collections, notably that of the Stadholder Willem V (1748 – 1806).

Born in Dordrecht in 1710, Schouman began his artistic training with the painter Adriaan van der Burg (1693-1733). Inspired by the training he received, Schouman himself became a teacher in 1733 and continued to teach for the remainder of his life. He retained the position of Director of the Dordrecht Guild of St. Luke from 1742 until 1792. In 1736 he founded the Confrerie in The Hague, a fraternity of amateur art enthusiasts from Dordrecht and the surrounding regions. During his career, he travelled to England, and assembled a notable collection of paintings.

Prior to the Dordrecht Museum exhibition, the most significant showing of the artist’s work in recent times was in 2004, when the collection of Saam and Lily Nijstad was sold at Sotheby’s Amsterdam, presenting no fewer than twenty-five drawings by Schouman, which demonstrated the Dordrecht master’s exceptional range and talent.¹

These three fine watercolours from the Fairhaven Collection, depicting a Scarlet Macaw, two Red-legged Partridges (lot 66) and a Mallard Drake (lot 64), are all exceptional examples, in both quality and condition, of Aert Schouman’s celebrated bird studies. They illustrate the artist’s preferred formula for presenting his natural history subjects: one or two specimens, often exotic rather than native, whenever possible drawn life-size, with minimal landscape as a backdrop. Many of his drawings, like the present examples, are inscribed on the verso, often with details of the species depicted, some with his initials and date and some indicating where he studied the actual bird or animal that is shown.

1. Een koninklijke paradijs, Aert Schouman en de verbeelding van de natuur, Dordrechts Museum, 2017

2. Sale, Amsterdam, Sotheby's, The Unicorno Collection: Fifty-five Years of Collecting Drawings, 19 May 2004, lots 204-224