brought an element of Mitteleuropean baroque grandeur to English painting. He spent

two years, 1684-86, in Amsterdam, arriving in London by 1688, the year that put ‘Dutch

William’ on the English throne. Bogdani established himself as a painter of flowers and

fruit, but in the first decade of the eighteenth century began to produce bird paintings,

perhaps inspired by the magnificent Windsor aviary belonging to Admiral George

Churchill (1654-1710), the Duke of Marlborough’s brother. Churchill was one of his

most important patrons; he also worked for William III and Mary II, and Queen Anne.

Bogdani was influenced by the work of the Amsterdam bird painter Melchior de

Hondecoeter (1636-1695), who also worked for William III. However, his paintings

eschew the fierceness of some of Hondecoeter’s pictures, the sense of ‘nature red in

tooth and claw’. Bogdani, who came from a Protestant gentry family, was said to be a

‘mild gentle temper’d man, courteous & civil’; in the words of Miklos Rajnai, he reeducated Hondecoeter’s style ‘in the manners of the drawing room’.