The Dordrechts Museum presents exceptional loans from the Royal Collections of the Netherlands and Museum Arnhem: two works by Aert Schouman and a painting by Melchior d’Hondecoeter.

In 1748, Dordrecht painter Aert Schouwman moved to The Hague, where Stadtholder William V became his most important patron. In William V’s menagerie behind Huis ten Bosch—a forerunner of the modern zoo—Schouman created watercolors and wall hangings based on living and exotic animals, such as birds, an orangutan, elephants, and deer.

Two of these monumental wall hangings, now part of the Royal Collections of the Netherlands, are currently on view at the Dordrechts Museum. Together with works from the museum’s own collection, they offer a magnificent overview of Schouman’s oeuvre as well as that of his contemporaries and sources of inspiration, including Melchior d’Hondecoeter.

Alongside d’Hondecoeter’s Fable of the raven robbed of the feathers he wore to adorn himself (1671) from Museum Arnhem, the paintings reveal the love of birds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the first time, the finest Dutch bird painters of that era can be admired side by side at the Dordrechts Museum. This loan of the work by d’Hondecoeter was made possible with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt.