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

Frans Snyders · 1614

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

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

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

Few paintings capture the sheer abundance of the Flemish market quite like Frans Snyders' monumental still life, where tumbling game birds, gleaming fruit, and tangled vegetables fill the canvas with breathtaking confidence. Snyders was the foremost painter of animals and still life in seventeenth-century Antwerp, a city obsessed with the pleasures of the table and the theatre of commerce. Where many contemporaries arranged their subjects with careful symmetry, Snyders preferred organised chaos — piles that seem on the verge of spilling toward the viewer, surfaces alive with contrasting textures from the soft down of a dead partridge to the waxy skin of a lemon. His command of surface and light gave his work a physicality that no other painter of his era quite matched. Snyders collaborated closely with Rubens throughout his career, and the two regularly contributed to each other's canvases — Rubens painting figures into Snyders' market scenes, Snyders painting animals into Rubens' hunting pictures. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is executed on canvas using the same layered technique Snyders employed, preserving the painting's extraordinary depth of colour and the tactile richness that makes the original, now held at the Art Institute of Chicago, so enduringly compelling.