Larder Still life

Entry

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