Flemish painter. He probably went to Italy in 1650-51 and then became a master of the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp. In 1668 he worked for Charles Le Brun at his Parisian tapestry workshop, as well as being a court painter (‘peintre ordinaire du roi’). Among other things he painted animals in the style of Fyt, as well as vanitas still-lifes.
The painting is signed with monogram lower right: PB.
Pieter Boel, who specialized in game still-lifes, owes much to Jan Fyt. He may also have been one of his students, possibly after having first trained under Frans Snyders. Boel worked with a smoother touch than Fyt; the specifically Italian manner of still-life painting also seems to have been important in the shaping of his style.
The painting shows a sarcophagus in a half-ruined church, with its vanishing point on the left. Objects of vanity are assembled in the foreground, piled up in the shape of a pyramid and culminating in an ermine coat, a turban (at the very top, at the banister, next to the skull), a royal crown, a mitre and a globe. These symbols of secular and ecclesiastical power at the zenith of the composition are further explained by a richly decorated bowl, worked by a goldsmith. It shows mythological scenes of unhappy love relationships, partly covering those ‘vanitates’ which are of lower order - a tambourine, lute, sabre, coat of mail and painter’s palette, to name but a few. The statue of a mourning female figure in one of the niches bears great resemblance to the woman whose contours can be seen in Nicolas Poussin’s famous self-portrait at the Louvre. She can be regarded as a late successor to the weeping women who surround the altar tomb of Philip the Bold in Dijon.
Pieter Boel’s painting contains all the features normally associated with baroque solemnity, i.e. pomp and splendour even where power and wealth have become subject to the darkness of death. However, although all earthly possessions and authority are marked as vain, the dialectic of the painting never leaves any doubt that their real substance remains undisputed in this world and that the earthly order is preserved intact.
This painting depicts a still-life of peonies, roses and other flowers in a terracotta vase, together with a swan, peacock and boar’s head, resting on a red drape and an antique architectural fragment.
This unusual Still-Life with Owl was formerly attributed to Frans Snijders’ most accomplished pupil, Jan Fyt. However, it is actually ascribed to another pupil of Snijders, namely Pieter Boel. These artists displayed true virtuosity in their rendering of the different textures of fur and plumage.
Pieter Boel was trained by Frans Snyders, a collaborator of Rubens specialising in still-lifes and animal painting. He went to Paris to join the group working under the direction of Le Brun at the Manufacture des Gobelins around 1668-69, and was asked to provide the cartoons for the animals in the foreground of tapestries. Between 1669 and 1671 he executed eighty-one studies after the birds and mammals of the menagerie of the château of Versailles.
