SNYDERS, Frans

From the 1630s the settings of Snyders’s hunting and animal fighting paintings become more Baroque. The Boar Hunt, which is more than five metres wide, is one of the most characteristic examples of Snyders’s late style. The colourful and varied appearance of such paintings demonstrate his increasing reaction to the growing requirement for decorative settings, which was also apparent in other fields of painting.

During the seventeenth century, dramatic hunt scenes often decorated royal hunting lodges. While Snyders’s contemporaries normally put man at the centre of such images, Snyders concentrated on realistic observation of the animals. His highly sought-after paintings were often based on portraits of individual hunting dogs. Here, the dog on the far right may be wearing a protective cloak because he was particularly prized by his owner.

The painting is signed lower right, on dog’s collar: F. Snyders fecit.

Frans Snyders was the first specialist in a new Flemish form of still-life: the animal still-life. In addition he painted also scenes representing animals in action, he was often employed by Rubens to paint the animal sections of his paintings.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 14 minutes):

Ottorino Respighi: Birds, suite

The painting shows a cook preparing a meal and is set in a basement room. The woman is grinding spices with a pestle and mortar - there is a rolled-up bag full of cloves on the table in front of her - to improve the flavour of the vegetables (artichokes, asparagus and red turnips) and the different roasts. The artist’s macabre sense of humour prompted him to depict the rabbit (on the left), both paws stretched out and flexed, as if with rigor mortis. Desserts have been placed on the shelf at the back, including a pie, lemons (one of them halved), a china bowl with strawberries and a bulging greenish jug which matches the two glasses with knob handles, hardly noticeable against the dark background.

The sinuous lines of fish, familiar from childhood to an artist whose father owned one of Antwerp’s biggest eating-houses, seem made for dynamic Baroque compositions. The precision with which Snyders depicts the denizens of seas and rivers delights zoologists, but the abundance of his many Fish Stalls is ruled not by any Linnaean hierarchy: the crustaceans whose shedding of their shells symbolized the resurrection are superior to dead fish.

The Fish Shop, one of four market scenes, was originally painted for Jacques van Ophem, Snyders’s patron to decorate one of the rooms in his mansion in Brussels. The large canvas was later acquired by Catherine II in 1772. The canvas spectacularly displays the abundant gifts from the sea.

Flemish artists of the 17th century, like Roelandt Savery and Jan van Kessel, use a narrative subject as a vehicle for painting their animals, while Frans Snyders, by contrast, takes a realistic starting point - a market scene - for his painting of the Fishmonger’s. The dramatic, large format was also used for hunting scenes.

This painting is part of a series of four market stalls commissioned from Snyders by Jacques van Ophem, powerful representative of the administration of Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella - the Spanish viceroys in the Southern Netherlands.

This painting is part of a series of four market stalls commissioned from Snyders by Jacques van Ophem, powerful representative of the administration of Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella - the Spanish viceroys in the Southern Netherlands.

Occasionally it is hard to distinguish market scenes from the genre of early kitchen scenes which also tended to display still-life features. Similar to the market stall, they often show tables and sideboards with clusters of baskets and bowls full of fruit and vegetables. Many kitchen scenes are only distinguishable from market scenes by the setting. While the former have their location in a dark basement room, the latter often appear to be situated alongside the wall of a house, with a view of an open square or a street to the side.

This painting is part of a series of four market stalls commissioned from Snyders by Jacques van Ophem, powerful representative of the administration of Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella - the Spanish viceroys in the Southern Netherlands.

A variety of artists active in Rubens’ immediate circle specialized in landscapes, still-lifes or animal paintings and were called on from time to time to add those elements to larger compositions by other painters. Best-known among these figures is Frans Snyders. His image of a Greyhound Catching a Young Wild Boar is a characteristic example of the dramatic animal paintings that were so successful in the 17th century.

Dog portraiture began in France at the court of Louis XV, who commissioned portraits of his favourite hounds hunting scenes of Frans Snyders. In England, where the emphasis in hunting was increasingly being placed upon the performance of individual hounds, which led to intense rivalry among the landed elite, this was reflected in the paintings of John Wootton and Peter Tillemans; the former of whom in particular started to produce portraits of dogs in the mid eighteenth century. Fine examples of Wootton’s work in this manner include the mock heroic portrait of Horace Walpole’s favourite dog Patapan, painted in 1743. However, it was Stubbs, a generation later, who really developed the genre, working, as he was, at a time when dogs were becoming increasingly valued not only as sporting trophies, but as objects of interest in themselves. By the late eighteenth century, the dog had gained a new status as a prized possession within English households which it had not formerly enjoyed. Stubbs’s highly sensitive paintings of these animals are executed with infinite attention to detail and are possessed with boundless character and charm. Whilst they are seldom uninteresting as paintings, at their best they are small masterpieces.

The landscape in the present painting was painted by Jan Wildens.

This early painting by Snyders depicts a kitchen still-life with a woman shucking oysters and a maid preparing vegetables in the background.

In his earliest scenes of hunting and animals fighting, Snyders sometimes borrowed individual motifs from Rubens’s works. After 1620 he began to model himself on them more specifically: his Lioness Attacking a Boar, painted around 1620, is one of the first examples of this new trend.

The characteristic feature of this painting is the combination of the Still-life and genre scene with some reminiscence of Beuckelaer’s monumental paintings.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 9 minutes):

Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto in B flat major RV 362 op. 8 No. 10 (Hunt)

The painting depicts a still-life of fruit in a basket, flanked by melons, grapes and figs, partridge, all on a ledge draped in a red cloth, with a hare suspended from a nail to the left.

This still-life contains fruit in a basket together with game, a bowl of fraises-de-bois, artichokes, asparagus and a squirrel upon a table draped with a red cloth. Many of the elements found in the present work recur in numerous other signed works dated from the second half of the 1630s. The central basket of fruit with the animated squirrel appears e.g. in the still-life in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne.

This painting depicts a still-life of a basket of grapes, birds, including a partridge, snipe, sparrow and finch, two blue-and-white Wan-Li porcelain bowls with langoustines, a knife, two wine glasses, a roemer, stoneware ewer and a parcel gilt salt cellar upon a stone ledge.

Frans Snyders, Rockox’s friend and neighbour and a witness to his last will and testament, was the leading still-life and animal painter of his time. His fruitful career was linked in close symbiosis with the artistic world of Rubens, with whom he frequently collaborated. Both the paintings Snyders made alone and those he produced in collaboration with Rubens are so intimately bound up with Rubens’ ideas and language of form that they have to be appreciated in this context. Just as in Rubens’ work, Snyders assembles the elements of his paintings not only on the basis of their artistic characteristics, but also as elements with a part to play in the overall design and decorative effect of the canvas as a whole. The luxuriant Still-Life is a representative example of Snyders’ oeuvre.

The main theme of this still-life is abundance: it depicts a buck, a lobster on a China plate, a squirrel in a basket of fruit, artichokes and a boar’s head in a tureen, with birds, a white napkin and asparagus on a draped table.

Frans Snyders specialised in still-life and animal paintings, he and his studio created many similar works to the present composition.

This painting shows a still-life with peaches in a tazza, cobnuts on a pewter plate, blackberries in a basket, with pears and a squirrel on a table.

The painting is signed lower right: F. Snyders // Fecit 1614.

Just as a circle of specialists for individual genres gathered in Amsterdam around Rembrandt, the same was true in Antwerp around Rubens. Snyders frequently collaborated with him on arrangements of objects and staffage. On the other hand, Snyders also adopted Rubens’ new Baroque principles into his own specialized area of still life. The result was a number of new pictorial types in this field.

He initially drew upon the great kitchen interiors and pantry paintings of the Flemish Mannerists such as Aertsen or Beuckelaer. However, whereas these artists created “epic” arrangements of enormous breadth, Snyders sought to produce more dynamic still-lifes. He created the hunting still-life which not only features game, but also includes certain elements of the hunt itself, and in which each animal, dead or alive, still has its own tale to tell. In his portrayal of animals, he was peerless in his time. Whereas Dutch still-life presented coded “truths” and warned of the transience of earthly life, Snyders staged a theatrical drama portraying the riches of the world. Snyders’ pantry scenes, a variation on the hunting still-life, are equally dynamic.

Son of the owner of one of the largest restaurants in Antwerp, famous for its abundance of vegetables, fruit, fish and game, Snyders found rich material for his paintings. Snyders created his own individual concept of still life painting, which was monumental, decorative and dynamic.

By the early 1640s when this grandiose still life was painted, Frans Snyders was at the height of his powers and his wealth and reputation securely established. The deer and the boar’s head were by this date common motifs in Snyders’s large game pieces, he seems to have kept a stock of such motifs for use in these larger canvases. Snyders introduces animals into his compositions to achieve a sense of movement: the motif of a hound or two sniffing the game is almost ubiquitous throughout these works, as indeed are almost any combination of parrots, squirrels, monkeys and cats.

Snyders’s usually large canvases and panels are characterized by an abundance of birds, game, fruit, fish, meat and vegetables in a lively arrangement. The exact representation of the texture of feathers, fur and skin, as well as the luminous, powerful colouring in his later works are outstanding.

The painting was executed by Frans Snyders and his workshop. It is signes on the collar of the dog, lower centre left, brown paint “F. Snyd… fecit (indistinct)”.

This is the surviving left segment of The Fishmonger with a figure by one of Rubens’ pupils, and a view of the Antwerp wharf in the background.

The genre of the still-life composed of things to eat was created at the end of the 16th century by the Antwerp painter Pieter Aertsen. Frans Snyders gave it a decorative amplitude that belongs to the Baroque spirit.

A pupil of Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Frans Snyders was admitted as a free master to the Guild of St Luke in 1602. He then spent time in Italy before returning to settle permanently in Antwerp in 1609. At a time when orders were pouring in, painters made use of specialised colleagues for certain parts of the works. Artists like Rubens, Van Dyck, Jordaens and Cornelis de Vos all called on Frans Snyders to produce the animal motifs in their paintings.

The scene is set in the kitchen of a vast house. A maidservant, said to be painted by Cornelis de Vos, is carrying a tray full of quails and crowned with a pheasant. Her head turned to the right, she is standing alongside a large rectangular table spilling over with victuals. The painting is organised on several levels around a white swan, whose body and outstretched wings occupy the centre of the scene. Next to it, a gutted roebuck is hanging by one paw from a hook. A lobster, a peacock and some birds are laid out on the table. A wicker basket spilling over with fruit and a copper basin with quarters of meat add to the impression of abundance. A rack at the top of the painting from which hang two salmon steaks, birds and two hares, strengthens the horizontal aspect of the composition. In the left foreground, a plate of oysters is placed on a bench, whilst, to the far right, a wicker basked is laden profusely with fruits and vegetables. A cat, preparing to steal fish from a serving dish, and a dog, avidly viewing the servant’s plate, provide a lively contrast to the dead animals.

The Pantry is similar to monumental paintings mixing people and still-lifes created by Aertsen, Beuckelaer and Lucas van Valckenborch. The work probably has a deeper meaning. It would well be that the poultry, the parrot, the dog, the cat and the roebuck embody the five senses, whilst the birds, the fish, the fruit and vegetables, the lobster and the game symbolise the four elements of air, water, earth and fire respectively. In the same order of things, the maidservant and the birds (the Dutch word “vogelen”, literally “to bird”, also refers to the sexual act) are perhaps an allusion to worldly temptations and to physical love.

This still-life from the collection of Margrave Hermann von Baden-Baden, which has - probably correctly - been ascribed to Frans Snyders, may have belonged to Rubens at one time. It is one of the few examples of early 17th-century Flemish paintings which do not show market or kitchen scenes but the agricultural sphere of the production itself. However, it is worth noting that the farmer’s labour, as a source of the new wealth, has been completely delegated to the background (small section in the top right corner).

Frans Snyders, Rockox’s friend and neighbour and a witness to his last will and testament, was the leading still-life and animal painter of his time. His fruitful career was linked in close symbiosis with the artistic world of Rubens, with whom he frequently collaborated. Both the paintings Snyders made alone and those he produced in collaboration with Rubens are so intimately bound up with Rubens’ ideas and language of form that they have to be appreciated in this context. Just as in Rubens’ work, Snyders assembles the elements of his paintings not only on the basis of their artistic characteristics, but also as elements with a part to play in the overall design and decorative effect of the canvas as a whole.

The monumental work Wild Boar Hunt gives a striking portrayal of the tragic lot of both the victim and the hounds who have cornered him.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 3 minutes):

Carl Maria von Weber: Der Freisch�tz, Act III: Jägerchor