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| Willem van Aelst Hunting Still Life 1668 oil on canvas Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe |
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| Willem van Aelst Hunting Still Life 1660 oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie, Berlin |
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| Willem van Aelst Hunting Still Life 1664 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Willem van Aelst Still Life with Fowl and Game 1661 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Willem van Aelst Still Life with Fowl 1658 oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Willem van Aelst Vanitas Flower Still Life, with Watch 1656 oil on canvas North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh |
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| Willem van Aelst Vanitas Flower Still Life, with Watch 1663 oil on canvas Mauritshuis, The Hague |
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| Willem van Aelst Vanitas Flower Still Life, with Watch (detail) 1663 oil on canvas Mauritshuis, The Hague |
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| Willem van Aelst Still Life with Peaches and Grapes ca. 1660-70 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Willem van Aelst Still Life with Fruit 1652 oil on canvas Palazzo Pitti, Florence |
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| Willem van Aelst Flower Still Life 1675 oil on canvas Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
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| Willem van Aelst Flower Still Life 1663 oil on canvas Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
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| Willem van Aelst Flower Still Life ca. 1663 oil on canvas Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio |
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| Willem van Aelst Hunting Still Life (detail) ca. 1665 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Willem van Aelst Hunting Still Life ca. 1665 oil on canvas private collection |
Birds
It is because of the birds, beaked dinosaurs
flying around in my century, raucous and dirty
or obsequious, their falsely sweet trill-language
a trick to make me think that I could understand them –
it is because they could balance no-hands on air, go
places that I could not, unexpected as locusts
and as many, scavengers, indestructible,
a world presence preceding me everywhere –
and because I was schooled in genealogies, knowing how low,
like the reptiles, they had branched on the family tree –
and that, like spring, they came after winter,
with their bald beaks and swoop and fluttering –
and all of this before Hitchcock, whose film
confirmed what I as a girl already knew,
that I was right to hate them:
it is because of this that I understand prejudice.
– Kinereth Gensler (1983)