UTRECHT, Adriaen van

This painting depicts a peacock, turkey, chickens, and ducks with their young drinking, playing and pecking about in a yard.

The painting comes from Ghent’s Abbey of St Peter, where it hung over the fireplace in the kitchen. This monumental painting, with its realistically represented fish, shellfish and crustaceans, has a hidden moral message: distracted by the abundance of good things and their amorous thoughts, the principal figures fail to notice the cutpurse as he surreptitiously goes about his business.

Van Utrecht adopted the same abundant displays of game, fruit and vegetables as Frans Snyders which are usually set on a table parallel to the picture plane; however, van Utrecht’s compositions typically fall in horizontal and vertical lines in contrast to the dynamic diagonals of Snyders.

The present still-life, an early work, displays apricots, plums, figs, peaches and grapes in a basket on a stone ledge, together with pears, squash and asparagus

This painting depicts a still-life of artichoke, asparagus, green cabbage, onion, beans, carrots and other vegetables, all upon a wooden bench.

This painting is one of a group of paintings that Van Utrecht produced in this form, beginning in the early 1640s, under the influence of small-format hunting pieces by Jan Fyt. A dead hare lies on a tabletop parallel to the painting’s lower edge with its back legs trussed together, with a number of birds around an inverted wicker basket. An arrangement of vegetables, comprising a melon, cabbages and globe artichokes, balances them on the right-hand side. Suspended above the two groups is a ring hook, such is used for hanging game, to which five birds of differing sizes have been attached. A light source presumably located outside the painting to the left casts a strong narrow shaft of light onto the arrangement from the side. Some areas, such as the small birds skewered together on the rod at the front, remain in shadow. A softer light falls from the opposite side, a device that the painter used regularly to give body to the forms in his still-lifes.

The individual motifs in the painting demonstrate a precise knowledge of the creatures depicted, which interestingly consist solely of small game. A wild duck, hanging by one leg in a dominant central position, is framed by two kingfishers, a sparrow and a blackbird, all attached to the ring. The hare lying head down on the tabletop echoes the bird’s vertical lines in its outstretched body and continues them in its two front legs hanging down at the front. Two dead snipe have been placed decoratively, although in a strange position, beside the hare, while a partridge leans against a basket. A bullfinch, a goldfinch, and a variety of other finches have been skewered on a rod that projects from the table, a visual idea that is echoed by the artichokes on the other side.

Adriaen van Utrecht drew inspiration in terms of both form and content from Frans Snyders, whose still-lifes with game and fowl1 contain a number of comparable motifs. But the precision in Van Utrecht’s painting, his constant attention to detail, and his controlled use of colour, centring chiefly on a cool grey with shades of brown, green and violet, is stylistically much closer to Jan Fyt.

Previously, the composition had been attributed to Pieter de Ring, on the basis of the ring which sits atop the book, and later to Pieter Adriensz. van de Venne.