Snyders’ dramatic larders, overflowing with game, fruit and vegetables, are some of the most enduringly popular compositions in his oeuvre and pioneered the development of Flemish still-life painting in the seventeenth century.

Between 1614 and 1618, Snyders established the canonical model of his larder scene, which featured selections of luxurious delicacies – small birds, boars, artichokes, asparagus, fruit – spread over partially draped tables. Whilst it is difficult to establish a chronology for an oeuvre that contains only a few known dated works, this picture can be dated to the 1640s, alongside a larger signed version offered at Sotheby’s, London, 3 July 2013, lot 14. By this time, the artist came to stage more economical compositions with a greater sense of order, unified by intersecting curves and dynamic spirals. Genre figures were eliminated to create an independent type of painting that brought the still-life in greater proximity of the viewer. Here, the greyish-green background complements the nuanced and luminous effect of Snyders’ colourful palette, achieved by the application of transparent glazes, a technique he mastered in the 1610s.

Snyders, alongside Rubens, worked for both the local civic government and the royal court in Spain, and it is depictions of game and hunting, that most aristocratic pastime, that brought him renown among his contemporaries. In their collaboration on The Recognition of Philopoemen of circa 1609 (Madrid, Museo del Prado), Rubens’ sketch for the work (Paris, Musée du Louvre) provided Snyders with the compositional paradigm of later still-lifes such as the present and became a powerful artistic force on the artist. In this work, Rubensian baroque diagonals imbue the scene with monumental grandeur, viewed from a high vantage point so as to reveal a deeper and more realistic sense of three-dimensional space.

A bright, cool light illuminates the contents of the table, with the variety and texture of the produce appearing in such close proximity to the viewer that it gives a strikingly tactile immediacy. Goods and game lie arbitrarily at the edges of the horizontal format, as if freshly arrived from the field and garden to supply the householder’s table with luxurious provisions. During the sixteenth and seventeenth century, as wealthy merchants and the nobility acquired estates with greater vigour than before, they lavished their tables with the fresh produce of the land. The emergence of the larder still-life coincided with the signing of the Twelve Years’ Truce of 1609, after which Netherlanders could anticipate a lengthy period of peace and tranquillity in the land, with the larder reflecting this optimism. In the allegorical symbolism of the seasons, elements and senses, as fruit is associated with autumn and the earth, so Snyders’ composition extols the joys of rural life and its plenitude, with the fruit alluding both to domestic abundance and charity. The presence of the poultry, yielded from the estate’s farm, is fitting as it was levied as a seigneurial tax (pachtschuld) paid by a landowner’s tenant farmers. This secular display of commodities of luxury as bounties of the land thus allowed the viewer to enjoy the composition without fear of overindulgence.

To Snyders’ contemporary audience, the motifs in this picture would have also held unmistakable moral connotations. The artist imbalances the composition with the parrot and leashed hounds to the left, which, looking in different directions, symbolise man’s conflicted nature between carnal temptation and spiritual aspiration. The assemblage of game, so prodigious that the creatures practically overflow to the floor, alludes to both lust and chaste love, embodied in the animal trophies, such as the boar, an attribute of the virgin goddess Diana, who, as huntress, symbolises the conquest of carnal passions. Tapestries depicting hunts often showed courtly lovers displaying their affection in the midst of a chase, with a late fifteenth-century German stag hunt tapestry announcing: ‘I am hunting for fidelity, and if I find it I will never have lived a happier time.’

We are grateful to Dr. Fred G. Meijer for proposing the attribution after first-hand inspection.