Birds, Butterflies and a Frog among Plants and Fungi, 1668 Melchior d'Hondecoeter (1636-1695)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Melchior d'Hondecoeter also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Birds, Butterflies and a Frog among Plants and Fungi is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A frog squats in the foreground like a polished stone, slick with pond-light. Everything else seems to take its cue from that little, weighty presence. One finch hops forward, head lowered, as if considering a peck; another hovers higher, wings half-open, all nerves and agitated balance. Above them, a chaffinch fluffs itself on a branch, while its mate sits lower beside a tree sparrow – domestic, almost cosy – until you notice how tense the whole thicket feels.

Melchior d'Hondecoeter makes drama out of small-scale life in Birds, Butterflies and a Frog among Plants and Fungi. The frog is far too large to be proper prey for these birds, which makes their hostility oddly irrational, like a neighbourhood quarrel. Meanwhile a snail inches along at the lower left, slow and edible, yet ignored – a tiny comic twist that also unsettles. Perhaps the real disturbance isn’t hunger at all, but intrusion: the wrong creature in the wrong place, upsetting the hierarchy.

Look at the light. It comes as a warm, evening glow from the left, catching the orange breast of a bird and picking out the pale rims of mushrooms at the right, while the background drops into an invented dusk of dark foliage and the hint of ruined masonry. The air feels heavy, damp, faintly mushroom-scented. Uprooted fungi and broken stems add a note of damage, as if something has just happened here.

d'Hondecoeter’s touch varies with intent. Feathers are described with quick, slightly awkward certainty – this is an early work – yet the natural history impulse is unmistakable. Two moths and a small tortoiseshell are set almost flat to the surface, like pinned specimens, while a painted lady hovers higher, more alive in its tilt. That contrast – cabinet versus undergrowth – places the picture in the Dutch Golden Age’s appetite for collecting and classification.

If you know his later The Floating Feather, with its grander, exotic birds, this scene feels closer to the ground and more psychologically prickly. Standing in front of it at the National Gallery London UK england united kingdom, one might imagine hearing the quick scuffle of claws on soil, then the sudden hush before a strike that never quite comes.