Dutch School, circa 1700
Hen and Chicks in a Farmyard with a Windmill
Oil on canvas

Unsigned. 25 x 36 inches (64 x 91 cm), the frame 27 x 38 inches (69 x 97 cm). Later gilt frame. Relined and stable, the paint thinned to the ground at the upper left, age craquelure.

The plumage of the white hen is built in short parallel strokes of grey, pale straw and broken white, laid side by side rather than blended. Her comb and wattles are a red that appears nowhere else on the canvas, and her eye is a single dark point ringed in light.

Chicks in yellow, grey and brown gather under her breast and around her, one still shapeless with down, while another bird perches on the rim of an earthenware pan at the left and her tail feathers rise behind her in a grey fan. The foreground is trodden earth, straw and a fallen beam, and the ground rises behind to a broken wall, with a post mill standing against a yellow sky beyond.