Circle of 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. De Hamilton specialized in ‘forest-floor’ still life landscapes and, in particular, bird subjects. Beautifully drawn in watercolour or gouache, his studies of birds are likely to have been produced as independent works of art for sale to collectors. When painting highly finished studies of individual birds, de Hamilton often chose to depict them standing on a single bare twig or branch, and isolated against a blank background. Among his most famous works are several 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.
