Forest floor still lifes with snails, snakes, lizards and butterflies

Provenance

Anon. Sale, Mak van Waay, Amsterdam, 23 May 1967, lot 431 (as by Otto Marseus van Schrieck), where purchased by Douwes on behalf of Dreesmann; Dr. Anton C.R. Dreesmann (inv. no. A-2); His deceased sale, London, Christie’s, 11 April 2002, lot 560.

Description / Expertise

Karl Wilhelm de Hamilton came from a family of artists working in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as court painters in central Europe, where they specialized in animal and still-life pictures. His father, James Hamilton (c. 1640-1720), was a Scottish artist active in Brussels, while his two brothers, Philip Ferdinand (c. 1664-1750) and Johann Georg (1672-1737), both worked in Vienna, the former employed as court painter to the Emperor Joseph I, to his successor Charles VI and later to Empress Maria-Theresa. Karl Wilhem himself worked as court painter in Augsburg for Bishop Alexander Sigismund von Pfalz-Neuburg, and may possibly be identified as the Hamilton recorded as working at the court in Baden-Baden between 1699 and 1707.

In his choice of subject matter, Karl Wilhelm was greatly influenced by Otto Marseus van Schrieck
(c. 1619-1678), who specialized in accurate depictions of reptiles and insects in forest floor or dune settings with a variety of flora, including moss, grass or herbs. Like van Schrieck, Hamilton was also concerned with the behaviour of and interaction between the creatures in his compositions: in the Colnaghi paintings, for example, the snakes are about to attack the butterflies, while the lizards look on. Despite such specific narrative content, however, the artist appears to have reused motifs and settings in his works. For example, the central group of leaves in the composition with the open-winged butterfly recalls that found in one of a pair of works formerly with Colnaghi. Although Karl Wilhelm also painted on canvas and panel, it was on copper that he produced his finest works, with the support giving the pigments a certain luminosity, as is evident in our pictures. In order to recreate the texture of the moss, Hamilton used the imprint of his thumb, a technique also deployed by artists such as van Schrieck and Rachel Ruysch.

Fred G. Meijer of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague, has endorsed the attribution to Karl Wilhelm de Hamilton on inspection of the originals and has dated the paintings to the latter part of Hamilton’s career on account of their exquisitely detailed, graphic manner. Dr. Meijer’s dating of this work is corroborated by comparing the handling of the moss and the reptiles in the present paintings with another forest floor still life by Hamilton which is signed with the monogram C.W.D.H. and dated 1735.