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Lot Essay
Frans Snyders grew up in his father’s inn, the Geschildert Huis (the Painted House) in Antwerp, a favorite gathering place of artists. At the age of fourteen, he was formally apprenticed to Pieter Brueghel II and later studied under Hendrick van Balen I. Neither of these masters’ styles made a lasting impression on Snyders’ own activities as a painter. It was instead his contemporary and close collaborator, Sir Peter Paul Rubens, who had the greatest influence on Snyders’ compositional strategies and palette. A few years after completing his training and joining the Guild of Saint Luke in 1602, Snyders spent a year in Italy, passing time in both Rome and Milan between 1608 and 1609. Thanks to a letter of recommendation from his friend, the slightly older artist Jan Brueghel I, Snyders obtained the patronage of Cardinal Federico Borromeo (who had likewise supported Brueghel during his own Italian sojourn some fifteen years earlier) and studied works by Italian artists in the Cardinal’s collection. Following his return to Antwerp, Snyders enjoyed a long and fruitful collaborative relationship with Rubens, often providing the animals, fruits and flowers in the artist’s paintings, while simultaneously painting his own independent compositions.
Over the course of a career that spanned nearly a half-century, Snyders transformed the genre of still life painting with innovative spatial constructions, verisimilitude and a previously unseen vitality in his handling of paint. Quick and confident strokes beautifully render fur and feathers, while thickly applied mounds of paint delineate crisp linens and hearty stalks of cauliflower and artichokes. Hella Robels dates the present work to the 1640s (loc.cit.), a period when his reputation as an animal painter was securely established and his mature style was fully developed. This period is characterized by a greater economy in the selection of objects displayed, a tonal unity in his color palette and gracefully curving compositions. Here, the warm browns of the fur and feathers are punctuated by pops of complementary reds and greens, and the composition follows the swerving diagonal formed by the peacock’s feathers, a motif Snyders employed in a number of his pantry scenes. As is typical of Snyders’ working practice, key parts of the composition – including the sweeping curve of the peacock’s feathers – were worked out in one or more preparatory drawings (fig. 1). The peafowl and hare are reproduced in paint quite faithfully, with only minor edits in the placement of the cat and the basket of game. The boar’s head and deer may also derive from similar drawings, as examples of Snyders’ pen studies for these animals can be found in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, and the Institut Néerlandais, Paris, respectively.
Over the course of a career that spanned nearly a half-century, Snyders transformed the genre of still life painting with innovative spatial constructions, verisimilitude and a previously unseen vitality in his handling of paint. Quick and confident strokes beautifully render fur and feathers, while thickly applied mounds of paint delineate crisp linens and hearty stalks of cauliflower and artichokes. Hella Robels dates the present work to the 1640s (loc.cit.), a period when his reputation as an animal painter was securely established and his mature style was fully developed. This period is characterized by a greater economy in the selection of objects displayed, a tonal unity in his color palette and gracefully curving compositions. Here, the warm browns of the fur and feathers are punctuated by pops of complementary reds and greens, and the composition follows the swerving diagonal formed by the peacock’s feathers, a motif Snyders employed in a number of his pantry scenes. As is typical of Snyders’ working practice, key parts of the composition – including the sweeping curve of the peacock’s feathers – were worked out in one or more preparatory drawings (fig. 1). The peafowl and hare are reproduced in paint quite faithfully, with only minor edits in the placement of the cat and the basket of game. The boar’s head and deer may also derive from similar drawings, as examples of Snyders’ pen studies for these animals can be found in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, and the Institut Néerlandais, Paris, respectively.