Marmaduke Cradock produced small paintings of both domestic and exotic birds for a wide audience, cultivating a market of middling consumers by working directly for dealers, as opposed to being commissioned by the great aristocratic patrons who turned to painters such as Jacob Bogdani or Francis Barlow (whose comparable works are shown nearby). Here a variety of native fowl mix with domesticated birds from beyond Europe, such as the turkeys from the New World, or the peacock from either Asia or Africa. Paintings like this were popular as decorative overmantels, or overdoors in smaller homes, and reveal how the popularity of painting was spreading to a new clientele by the end of the seventeenth century.
Text: Yale Center for British Art.
