FYT, Jan

The figures were painted by Erasmus Quellinus (1607-1678).

One group of paintings by Jan Fyt comprises paintings of birds. This canvas represents a characteristic example of this group.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 14 minutes):

Ottorino Respighi: Birds, suite

According to the principle of selection and in a clear iconographical reference to Snyders, Fyt has assembled a bouquet of the finest, most striking birds. With his eye-strewn plumage, a peacock - the bird sacred to Juno, mother of the gods of antiquity - lends noble and radiant beauty to the whole picture. A Brazilian parrot, a crowing cockerel with a comb, a gallinaceous bird and two herons are each adding their own song to the cacophonous concert of cawing, screeching, squawking, crowing and cooing. Meanwhile, a jay looks wonderingly at a blank music book that has wedged itself in a bough, at the foot of which lies a dead dove.

Jan Fyt became a master in Antwerp in 1629 after training under Frans Snyders and collaborating with him. He arrived at a sophisticated and elegant style which was, however, quite different from that of his teacher. His still-life of game are examples of his style. A brace of partridges or a hare, with a gun dog apparently guarding the bag, often located in the open air with a background of trees, or else on a terrace or in the entrance hall of a fine country house.

Game still-lifes were closely connected with kitchen scenes and pantry motifs, of which they were in many ways a special form. While the social context of a kitchen is not always obvious and may be either the household of the landed gentry or the merchant patrician classes, the majority of early, large-format game still-lifes reflected the interests and spheres of royalty and nobility. The hunt as an aristocratic privilege had only just began to emerge at the beginning of early modern times. Hunts were captured in the form of large-scale panoramic paintings. Also there were numerous glorified transpositions of real hunting scenes into mythological ones. This painting shows an example of this approach.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 9 minutes):

Joseph Haydn: The Seasons, Part 3 Autumn, aria and chorus (Hunters’ chorus)

The painting depicts Diana receiving the spoils of the hunt.

Jan Fyt painted delicately nuanced flowers and captured the subtle qualities of animal skins and bird plumage. These values can be clearly appreciated in his Ducks and Water Hens Surprised by Dogs.

The painting shows a game piece with a hare and various wild birds. A cat approaches from the right, creeping over the fallen log, his eyes on the small birds piled below him.

The fact that this subtle still-life is known under the title Mushrooms is understandable given the prominent place taken by four boletus in the left foreground of the picture. This name fails, though, to do justice to the other elements that, precisely through their presence alongside the mushrooms, form an exceptionally balanced composition: to the left a wicker basket, to the right of it a melon, a root of celery and four thrushes, which, along with the warm, greenish brown colouring, appear to evoke autumn. It is not impossible that a reference to autumn is indeed woven into this jewel of a painting. But apart from the objects themselves there is no unambiguous reference to any symbolic, literary or allegorical significance. This may be precisely one of the charms of what is a fairly self enclosed painting for a modern viewer whose pictorial culture has been so strongly formed by the poetic cult of art for art’s sake and form for form’s sake, i.e. of “pure” art, which turns its back on any prosaic anecdotal intent. Or whose sensitivity for the refined play of surfaces and for carefully balanced colour nuances and the objects that populate everyday life has since been whetted by contact with masters like Jean Sim�on Chardin.

The still-life painter Jan Fyt was a pupil of his better known colleague Frans Snyders. In 1629 he became a free master in Antwerp, but he also lived in Paris and in Italy. His oeuvre had a major influence on Pieter Boel, who may well have been his pupil. Fyt was a self-confident artist whose sophisticated and expensive work was, in his own words, purchased mainly by the high nobility. His art reflects a more general development towards an aristocratisation of social life. In the noticeable refinement of texture and colour, Fyt’s relationship to Snyders is similar to that of Anthony van Dyck to Peter Paul Rubens. In Rubens and Snyders robust, highly plastic forms dominate. Not averse to a certain degree of sentimentality, Van Dyck and Fyt seem to exchange this organic powerfulness for a fragile sensitivity. This leads to an art that will speak in particular to lovers of artistic nuance.

This painting is unusual in Jan Fyt’s oeuvre in its monumental scale, and also in its lively depiction of the animals in their natural habitat, in contrast to Fyt’s more conventional depiction of game already captured, or displayed as a trophy guarded by dogs.

The painting is signed and dated lower centre on a rock: Joannes.FYT/1658.

This still-life depicts fruit, hunting trophies, a parrot, a cat and a dog. It is a collaborative work with Johannes Hermans, called Mons� Aurora (active c. 1644-c. 1659).

The painting shows a still-life of fish, oysters, a crab and a lobster with cats, a tub, a copper dish and bucket and baskets at the foot of a draped column. In the background a quay and a castle by the sea can be seen. This large scale and richly coloured composition was probably produced for the private home of a patron connected to the fish trade.

The monkey in this sumptuous still-life is an allusion to sensual pleasure.

Jan Fyt is acclaimed as the greatest Flemish animal painter after Frans Snyders. Particularly celebrated are his game still-lifes and open-air hunting scenes, a genre of which he may be considered the inventor. In 1729 Jacob Campo Weyerman described Fyt as a second Noah, since he too gathered animals and birds into his painting, and saw in him a sort of van Dyck of the still-life.

The painting is signed.

This painting is typical of the artist’s rich colour and technical brilliance.

This signed and dated game still-life depicts the spoils of the chase being guarded by a dog, a landscape beyond. It perfectly exemplifies the painter’s exuberant and optimistic artistic personality.

Although the oeuvre of Jan Fyt covers the same themes as that of Snyders, and deals with them in a comparable manner, he does not really belong to the School of Rubens. Whereas Snyders’ work is rich in glowing colours, Jan Fyt’s coloration is darkened by deep shadows which give his paintings a cooler mood. He had a remarkably sensitive eye for the feel of things - rough or smooth - and the way light plays on them, conveying all this with great subtlety of brushwork and colour. His Vase of Flowers shows surprising spontaneity, which gives this canvas a far more modern spirit than the work of his contemporaries.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 7 minutes):

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker, ballet suite, op. 71, Waltz of the Flowers

Jan Fyt was trained by Frans Snyders, a collaborator of Rubens specialising in still-lifes and animal painting. Fyt combined those two activities in a highly decorative type of painting, whose lively treatment and a vigour was indebted to Rubens.