Jakob Bogdani

Biography

Among Bogdani’s pictures there is one without a crowd: “Two Icelandic Falcons”, two snow-white gyrfalcons. Usually his canvases are so packed with birds that little room is left for landscape.

He was born on 6 May 1658 in Eperjes, in Sáros County in the north of the Kingdom of Hungary; it is now Prešov in Slovakia. According to some accounts, his father was the painter Lucas Bogdani. His name is spelt in various ways: Jakob or Jacob, Bogdani or Bogdány; in Hungarian he is Bogdány Jakab.

In 1684 he went to Amsterdam and lived there until 1688. In Amsterdam he met a fellow Hungarian, Miklós Tótfalusi Kis, a letter cutter and typographer who had also studied in the Netherlands. Where and with whom Bogdani trained as a painter cannot be seen from the available material; I found no documents about it. In 1688 he moved to London. There he became a specialist in still life and bird painting at the court of Queen Anne; according to some accounts, his work was also known at the court of William III of Orange. Several of his pictures entered the Royal Collection. One of his chief patrons was Admiral George Churchill, brother of the Duke of Marlborough. Churchill’s famous aviary in Windsor Park may have supplied subjects for some of the paintings, though I know of no direct confirmation.

The mix of birds on his canvases shows best how he worked. Beside cockatoos, macaws and mynas, which were being imported into European menageries at the time, he placed familiar European birds: the great tit and the blue tit, the green woodpecker, the jay. Almost every picture has a bright red accent: a scarlet ibis, a red avadavat or a northern cardinal. He probably saw the exotic birds in menageries, not in the wild.

In 1693, according to some accounts, he married Elizabeth Hemmings. They had two children: a son, William, who became a prominent British civil servant, and a daughter, Elizabeth, who married the painter Tobias Stranover. Bogdani influenced the bird painter Marmaduke Cradock.

“Two Icelandic Falcons”, painted around the turn of the 18th century, is now in Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery. Individual works are in the Hungarian National Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, and the painting “Cat among Roosters” is in the Slovak National Gallery. One of his pictures was used in 1974 on the cover of the album Exotic Birds and Fruit by Procol Harum.

Bogdani died on 11 November 1724 in Finchley, in north London.