(Antwerp 1579–1657)
A basket of fruit, a blue and white bowl with strawberries, a squirrel and game on a draped table,
oil on canvas, 76 x 105 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Rhineland, Germany, until 2018

The present work is another, slightly different version of a painting in the collection of the Prince of Liechtenstein, Vaduz/Vienna (see H. Robels, Frans Snyders, Munich 1989, p. 285/86, no. 169).

The present painting is a masterfully balanced composition from Snijders, exhibiting a characteristically rich variety of elements and textures, from the feathers of the dead game on the right, to the Delftware cup and saucer on the left, with the delicate impastos on the gleaming grapes behind. The picture exhibits Snijders’ ability both in handling bright colours and imbuing his forms with material intensity. While the objects are set upon the same rich crimson-draped table plane, a sense of depth is given by the glassware glinting behind and the three-dimensional feeling of the wicker basket of fruit perceived in-the-round.

Trained in both the workshops of Hendrick van Balen and Pieter Brueghel the Younger – who themselves often collaborated, Snijders was made a master of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1602. In keeping with most Antwerp painters of his day, a formative trip to Italy was undertaken, and where he was documented in 1608. Although celebrated for his painting of wild beasts in Peter Paul Rubens’s compositions he developed his own style, both as the city’s foremost ‘animalier’ and as an inventor of original still lifes, sometimes enlivened by dynamic human figures.