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拍品專文
This elegantly composed still life is an early work of circa 1613/4 by Frans Snyders. Snyders, who studied with Pieter Brueghel II and was a close collaborator and friend of the great Flemish master Sir Peter Paul Rubens, is rightly regarded as the leading Flemish still life painter of his age. Executed approximately a decade into the artist’s career, this painting brilliantly displays his early approach to still life painting in which he fully freed himself from the straightforwardly descriptive manner of painters like Osias Beert I in favor of innovative geometrically arranged compositions imbued with a degree of dynamism.
Snyders’ paintings of the 1610s, as here, tend to favor motifs of dead birds and tazze brimming with bunches of succulent green and red grapes set against a dark background. However, the masterfully rendered floral still life at right in this painting is rarely encountered in his works of the period and anticipates his more exuberant compositions of the 1620s and 1630s. Its inclusion not only offered Snyders a means of displaying his prodigious skills at rendering textures and the play of light across various surfaces, notably the subtle refraction of the flower stems seen through the glass vase, through carefully modulated transparent glazes but advances the painting’s thematic content as well. Hella Robels has rightly suggested that the grapes and butterfly perched atop a leaf at center respectively symbolize the blood of Christ and Resurrection (loc. cit.). These elements are counterposed with the flanking birds and flowers, frequent symbols of a life governed by the senses (voluptas carnis) and earthly vanity (vanitas), which were commonly believed to lead one to gluttony, drunkenness and moral looseness.
Another version of this composition, executed on a copper support, is in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich. A preparatory study for these paintings is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest (fig. 1). The attribution to Snyders has been endorsed by Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, who saw the painting in 1920 and whose label is on the reverse (fig. 2).
Snyders’ paintings of the 1610s, as here, tend to favor motifs of dead birds and tazze brimming with bunches of succulent green and red grapes set against a dark background. However, the masterfully rendered floral still life at right in this painting is rarely encountered in his works of the period and anticipates his more exuberant compositions of the 1620s and 1630s. Its inclusion not only offered Snyders a means of displaying his prodigious skills at rendering textures and the play of light across various surfaces, notably the subtle refraction of the flower stems seen through the glass vase, through carefully modulated transparent glazes but advances the painting’s thematic content as well. Hella Robels has rightly suggested that the grapes and butterfly perched atop a leaf at center respectively symbolize the blood of Christ and Resurrection (loc. cit.). These elements are counterposed with the flanking birds and flowers, frequent symbols of a life governed by the senses (voluptas carnis) and earthly vanity (vanitas), which were commonly believed to lead one to gluttony, drunkenness and moral looseness.
Another version of this composition, executed on a copper support, is in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich. A preparatory study for these paintings is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest (fig. 1). The attribution to Snyders has been endorsed by Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, who saw the painting in 1920 and whose label is on the reverse (fig. 2).