This is the standard Hondecoeter ‘product’: a large-scale decorative canvas, perhaps one of set, designed to decorate the interior of one of the grander Amsterdam town houses put up in the 1660s and 70s. The owner of the town house might also own a ‘buitenhuis’, an elegant classical villa with a formal gardens on the banks of a canal some miles from the city, which this painting (in a very general, exaggerated and idealised way) evokes for him. The other distinctive feature of de Hondecoeter’s work is the depiction of exotic fowl, also of a type to grace such a country house at a time when aviaries were becoming fashionable. De Hondecoeter here adopts a low view point, as if we the viewer belong to the animal kingdom and have attracted the attention of the spaniel. Behind the dog is a hen and her chickens, with a domesticated pigeon hovering over them and a crowned crane and a fighting cock on the left; in the middle distance are a hoopoe and a cassowary with peacocks in a formal garden beyond. Signed upper left: 'M. d'Hondecoeter'