Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 118.7 cm × width 173.1 cm
outer size: depth 13.5 cm (support incl. frame)
Frans Snijders
c. 1616 - c. 1625
oil on canvas
support: height 118.7 cm × width 173.1 cm
outer size: depth 13.5 cm (support incl. frame)
…; collection Stephanus Arnoldus Westerhof (?-1770), The Hague; his widow Henrietta van der Schagen (?-1780), The Hague; her sale, Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 16 May 1781, no. 51 (‘SNYDERS. (Frans) EEN STUK MET DOOD WILD; op Doek, hoog 62, breed 62 duim [162.1 x 180.4 cm]1 In dit kapitaal Tafereel ziet men een Tafel, overdekt met een somber rood Kleed, over dit Kleed legt ter linkerzyde een wit Servet, en hier op rust de kop van een Hart met korte Hoorns; verder hangt het lighaam van dit Beest leevensgrootte aan een poot in yzeren haak. Op de Tafel, ter linkerzyde, staat een Mand met Peeren, Pruimen, Persiken, Aprikozen en andere Vruchten; achter de Mand staat een Porselynen Kan, een Citroen, twee porselynen schaalen met Vruchten, een Gouden Kop en een Drinkschaal; ter rechterzyde op de Tafel is een blauwe Porselynen Schotel, onder denselven legt een bos Spergies, en op den schotel een Kreeft, enige Artischokken en een wild Zwynshoofd. Verder ziet men in een Nis een Fles met Bloemen, als Roozen, Irissen en andere dito; alles is in dit Konststuk Levensgrootte’), fl. 55, to the dealer Lommes, 1781; from whom, fl. 105, to Gerrit van der Pot (1732-1807), Lord of Groeneveld, Rotterdam; his sale, Rotterdam (Gebr. Van Rijp), 6 June 1808 sqq., no. 116 (‘SNIJDERS. (Frans). Hoog 45, en breed 66 duim [121.7 x 178.2 cm] Dk. Eene hangende Ree, benevens een Wilde Zwijnskop, Kreeft, Groenten, Vruchten en Bloemen, enz. op een tafel liggende en verder bijwerk’), fl. 455, to Van Lennep for Lodewijk Napoleon King of Holland;2 assigned to the museum, 1808;3 on loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 2006-114
Object number: SK-A-379
Copyright: Public domain
Frans Snijders (Antwerp 1579 - Antwerp 1657)
The still-life painter Frans Snijders, or as he signed official documents Franchoijs or François Snijders, was baptized in the Antwerp Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk, on 11 November 1579; he died on 19 August 1657 and was buried in the Minderbroederskerk. He was the son of a successful innkeeper. In 1593 he was apprenticed to Pieter Brueghel II (1564-1638); from an unknown date he was also taught by Hendrik van Balen I (1574/75-1632) before becoming a master in the guild of St Luke in 1602. He may soon have travelled to Italy for his first, extant signed and dated work of 1603 (known only from a reproduction)5 has an Italianate character. However, he is not documented there until September 1608. He had returned to Antwerp by July 1609; his first extant dated picture after this return is of 1612.6 The following year Jan Brueghel I (1568-1625) told Cardinal-Archbishop Federico Borromeo of the great progress Snijders had made. He was ‘unico in quella professione’ and continuously busy.
His association with Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) began soon after his return to Antwerp and was first demonstrated in his execution of the prominent still life in Rubens’s Recognition of Philopoemen (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid). They were to join forces intermittently for the rest of Rubens’s life; their last joint endeavour was eighteen pictures commissioned by King Philip IV of Spain (1605-1665), completed shortly before Rubens’s death. In Rubens’s last will Snijders was named, along with Jan Wildens (1584/1586-1653) and Jacob Moermans (1602-1653), as an advisor to the estate on the subsequent sales of works of art.
Snijders married Margriet de Vos on 23 October 1611 and lived for ten years on the Korte Gasthuisstraat. On 21 January 1622 his purchase of the house De Fortuyne on the Keizerstraat was completed. That his neighbour was the wealthy patrician Nicolaas Rockox (1560-1640) is evidence enough of the artist’s prosperity.7 His marriage proved childless and his wife predeceased him by ten years.
Robels divided his long career into three periods: 1593-1618, 1619-1640 and after 1640; his last extant dated work is from 1653.8 She assembled a painted oeuvre of some 300 works, and while the number of contemporary copies perhaps points to an active workshop, it was probably not on the same scale or run on similar lines as that of Rubens.9 Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand reported that he was a slow worker. He probably turned to his brother-in-law Paul de Vos (1595-1678), an independent master from 1620, to help him meet his commitments.
Among other artists with whom he collaborated, playing either the main or the subsidiary role, were Jan Boeckhorst (1604-1668), Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert (1613/14-1654), Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), Abraham Janssens I (1575-1632), Theodor van Thulden (1606-1669), Cornelis de Vos (his brother-in-law, 1584-1651), and Erasmus Quellinus II (1607-1678).
Van Dyck’s portraits of Snijders and his wife (Frick Collection, New York) are considered to be among his masterpieces.10
REFERENCES
P. Rombouts and T. van Lerius, De Liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche Sint Lucasgilde, ondere zinspreuk: ‘Wt Ionsten Versaemt’, 2 vols., Antwerp/The Hague 1864-76, I, p. 373, 418, 456, 528, 575 and II, 1876 (1961), p. 54, 185, 282, 284; C. de Bie, Het gulden cabinet van de edel vrij schilder const, inhoudende den lof vande vermartste schilders, architecte, beldtowers ende plaetsnijders van deze eeuwe, Antwerp s.a. [1662], p. 61 (for a reprint of the print in Meyssens Images de diverses Hommes d’Esprit … (F.W.H. Hollstein et al., Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts 1450-1700, Amsterdam/Roosendaal 1948-, XIV, p. 27)); G. Crivelli, Giovanni Brueghel, pittor fiammingo, o sue lettere e quadretti esistenti presso l’Ambrosiana, Milan 1868, pp. 111-12, 120, 135, 198; H. Robels, Frans Snyders, Stilleben- und Tiermaler, 1579-1657, Munich 1989 and in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols., Basingstoke 1996, XXVIII, pp. 901-04; S. Koslow, Frans Snyders: The Noble Estate. Seventeenth-Century Still-Life and Animal Painting in the Southern Netherlands, Antwerp 1995, pp. 13-29; E. Duverger, Fontes historiae Artis Neerlandicae Bronnen voor de Kunstgeschiedenis van de Nederlanden: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Antwerpse kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw, 13 vols., Brussels 1984-2004, I, p. 297, III, 1987, p. 70 and VII, 1993, pp. 187-89 for Snijders’s wills of 1613, 1627 and 1655; for the will of 1641 with the codicil of 1646, Robels 1989, p. 52 and note 155
Although another, larger version of this composition (present whereabouts unknown, but on the Antwerp art market in 1934) differing in the main in the configuration of objects and flowers on the rear wall, was accepted by Robels11 and recorded by her as signed, there seems no good reason to doubt her view that the Rijksmuseum picture is also (for the most part) autograph. Robels gave the former picture precedence; but a study of a black and white photograph (in the Witt Library) does not suggest that the level of its execution is higher, rather the contrary. It seems therefore unsafe to propose a sequence in their execution. But weakness in the present painting should not be ignored. While in the larger version the rear leg of the deer is attached by a rope and a hook, here the attachment of the hook to the rear wall of the recess above the ledge is not thought out. And while the vase of irises and roses is acceptable as Snijders’s work, the still life on the shelf is less assured.
Robels dates the Rijksmuseum picture to the ‘1620s(?)’. But it should be borne in mind that the handling of the coats of the sow and deer is similar to that in the Nymphs Spied on by Satyrs (British Royal Collection Trust), which painted in collaboration with Rubens may have been finished by August 1616.12
The disposition of the deer, quite often adopted by Snijders, first with a slight variation in the Chicago Game Market of 1614,13 must have depended on a study made from the life and is repeated in the second row from the top of a sheet of ricordi in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett.14 A similar sow’s head, which must also have depended on a study from the life, seen from a slightly different angle and with the mouth shut occurs in the top row of a sheet of ricordi in the Fondation Custodia, Paris.15
The deer is a roe deer buck (capreolus capreolus). It was traditional to ‘unmake’ a deer at the kill and also offer the hooves to the hounds. The ‘clean’ carcass (but with the hooves) in this and in all the other treatments of the genre by Snijders has been brought to the larder. The animal stood about 60-75 cm to the shoulder and was between 95-135 cm in length, and so, as the 1880 museum catalogue pointed out, is here depicted approximately life size. As on frequent other occasions, Snijders showed it ‘in velvet’, before its antlers were fully formed.
The head of the wild pig (sus scrofa) does not have the feared tusks of a boar, which were described in Gaston de Foix’s fourteenth-century Livre de Chasse: ‘He [the boar] uses the top tusks for no other purpose than to make the lower ones sharp and cutting; these lower ones are called his weapons or his files and with them he wreaks his evil …’.16 Evidently the head is that of a sow, which was also traditionally hunted though the chase was not so challenging. Snijders’s Hunt at Boston shows a sow and her young pursued by hounds.17 After the kill the head was traditionally cut off – not as a trophy18 – but to be placed as the prized centre-piece of a feast.
The deer is ‘in velvet’, its antlers covered in a hairy velvet-like ‘skin’ that marks the pre-calcified growth stage in summer. Koslow records that the closed (hunting) season in Brabant was between 1 March and 22 July.19 The season for hunting wild pig was in the second half of the year. Thus it was perfectly possible to have had a carcass of a deer ‘in velvet’ and the head of a wild pig in a larder at the same time. In the case of fruit and vegetables, and of flowers, Snijders was content to ignore seasonality.
The classification of this type of still life by its location in a larder was proposed by Koslow.20 Snijders made it a speciality, inspired probably by Peter Paul Rubens’s oil sketch of The Recognition of Philopoemen, executed with a view to his collaborating with Snijders in a large-scale painting.21
Koslow records the human failings that were traditionally associated with the lobster22 and the connection between cats and witchcraft and heresy.23 The boar was thought to embody gluttony and lust.24
The larder-type speciality as devised by Rubens and Snijders was a development of the market scenes depicted by Pieter Aertsen (1508-1575) and Joachim Beuckelaer (1533-1574). Its literary underpinning, as traced by Koslow,25 depended on the popularity of the hofdicht or country-house poem, the notion of the Dapis inempta, the unbought meal, conceived by Virgil and Horace, and the Estreines Villageoises, the phrase coined by Blaise de Vigenère to entitle – in 1578 – no. 26 of the book II of the Imagines by the elder Philostratus to describe the tenant farmer’s gifts to his parvenu landlord. Indeed the larder still life, in which dead game played such a prominent part, was likely to have appealed to members of the urban patriciate in the Netherlands as it could serve to illustrate their social status elevated by the acquisition or possession of a country estate.
The objects on the ledge at upper left consist in a Kraak klapmuts and bowl filled with fraises du bois(?), a silver-gilt cup and cover in the form of a bunch of grapes (traubenpokal)26 and a metal ewer.27 The lobster beneath is placed on a large Kraak dish.
Gregory Martin, 2022
H. Robels, Frans Snyders, Stilleben- und Tiermaler, 1579-1657, Munich 1989, no. 64
1809, p. 66, no. 285; 1853, p. 26, no. 262; 1858, p. 131, no. 293; 1864, p. 143, no. 305; 1880, p. 419, no. 490; 1885, p. 73, no. 490; 1934, p. 265, no. 2209; 1960, p. 285, no. 2209; 1976, no. 516, no. A 379
G. Martin, 2022, 'Frans Snijders, Larder Still life, c. 1616 - c. 1625', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5468
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