(Antwerp 1579–1657)
A basket of fruit with game, vegetables, and a squirrel,
signed lower right: F. Snyders fecit,
oil on canvas, 76 x 121 cm, framed

Provenance:
H. M. Clark, London;
with Galerie Hansen, Luzern, 1929;
with Galerie Heinemann, Munich, 1929;
Dr. Hugo Henkel (1881–1952), Düsseldorf;
Sotheby’s, London, 7th July 1993, lot 48;
Sotheby’s, Amsterdam, 17 November 1993, lot 71;
European Private Collection

Literature:
E. Greindl, Les Peintres Flamands de Nature Morte au XVIIe Siècle, 1956, p. 185;
H. Robels, Frans Snyders: Stilleben und Tiermaler; 1579–1657, Munich 1989, p. 269, no. 140.I;

Hella Robels has dated the present work to circa 1625-30, to the artist’s maturity.

It belongs to the still lifes of game with vegetables and animals of medium size that he painted from the beginning of his career until the early 1640s. The present painting perfectly displays Snyders’ masterly ability to represent fruit and animals with bright colours and material intensity. Snyders’ working method was to combine his chosen objects in a well-arranged group forming a balanced but varied composition. In the present work the objects are placed on a single elevation, but a sense of depth is suggested by elements (the lobster, asparagus, and birds) put on the diagonal leading from the lower centre to the right of the composition.

Several of the artist’s favoured motifs are included in the present work: the dead hare, game, the basket with grapes and other fruit, the lobster on a dish, and the squirrel for example. Within his oeuvre many of these elements can be seen in different and varied combinations. In particular, the motif of the dead hare placed on the border of the table with the head and legs dangling down over the edge was introduced by Snyders into his compositions to obtain a sense of movement and appears in many other works of this period, as for example “Game, Birds, Grapes and Vegetables” in the Gemäldegalerie, Kassel (see H. Robbels, op. cit., p. 254 n. 111), in association with artichokes and asparagus, and Game, Birds, Vegetables, and a Basket of Fruit, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (see H. Robbels, op. cit., p. 272, n. 147) where a very similar basket of fruit appears. A very similar autograph version, slightly larger, in which a vine twig on the left foreground replaces the squirrel has been noted by Robels (Sibiu, Museum Brukenthal; see Robels, op. cit., n. 140 II, illustrated).

Frans Snyders trained with Pieter Brueghel II and Hendrick van Balen. He became a specialist in still life and animal painting, and became a master of the Antwerp painters’ guild in 1602. After spending a year in Italy, where he is documented between 1608 and 1609, he returned to Antwerp. Here he developed his own style in depicting still life and animal subjects, and became an innovator of this emerging genre. Influenced by Italian painting and by the work of Rubens, his growing skill in the handling of many different objects and varied compositions, and as a colourist, gained him success and his work was prized by important patrons throughout Europe.