Still Life with Dead Game, Fruits, and Vegetables in a Market

Description

This Flemish market stall overflowing with dead game is enlivened by fighting roosters, an aggressive cat, and a pickpocket. An early example of Frans Snyders’s animated combination of highly ornamental still-life elements with secondary figures and a low viewpoint, this scene might have adorned the dining room of an aristocratic collector. Snyders was the leading Flemish painter of monumental still lifes. He regularly collaborated with his fellow Antwerp artist Peter Paul Rubens, contributing fruits and animals to Rubens’s compositions.

Provenance

Olléon collection by late 19th century; by family descent to Jean Olléon, Paris until at least 1970 [according to letter from Hella Robels, dated July 31, 1988, in curatorial file]. Galerie Birtschansky, Paris, 1980. Galerie Maurice Segoura, New York, 1981; sold to the Art Institute, 1981.

Still Life with Dead Game, Fruits, and Vegetables in a Market

Frans Snyders

1614

Accession Number

62042

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

212 × 308 cm (83 1/2 × 121 1/4 in.); Framed: 251.5 × 348 × 10.2 cm (99 × 137 × 4 in.)

Classification

oil on canvas

Museum

The Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, United States

Credit Line

Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection