Amsterdam School, mid-17th century

In the family of the present owner for the last thirty years.

The Northern Cardinal is a bird native to North America, and is therefore likely to have been a very rare specimen around the time this unidentified portrait was completed in the mid–seventeenth century. A near contemporary depiction of such a bird can be found in a forest floor still life by the Dutch painter Otto Marseus van Schrieck (1619/20–1678) in the collection of the Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie, Dessau.¹

¹ Oil on canvas, 52 x 39 cm.; G. Seelig, Medusa's Menagerie, Otto Marseus van Schriek and the Scholars, exh. cat., Munich 2017, p. 58, reproduced in colour fig. 40.