Karl Wilhelm DE HAMILTON
Brussels c.1668 - Augsburg 1754
Biography
The son and pupil of the Scottish still life painter James de Hamilton (c.1640-1720), who settled and worked in Brussels, Karl (or Carl) Wilhelm de Hamilton was one of a large family of artists active in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. His brothers Ferdinand Phillipp (c.1664-1750) and Johann Georg (1672-1737) were both active in Vienna, while Karl Wilhelm worked mainly in Germany, first in Baden-Baden and later in Augsburg, where he served as court painter to Bishop Alexander Sigismund von der Pfalz-Neuburg. Karl Wilhelm specialized in ‘forest-floor’ still life landscapes and, in particular, bird subjects. Among his most famous works are several different versions of a landscape known as The Parliament of Birds, based on a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer written around 1380, each of which incorporates between sixty and seventy different species of birds. Paintings by Karl Wilhelm de Hamilton are in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, and elsewhere.
