Following models by Frans Snyders

Flemish school, following models of FRANS SNYDERS (Antwerp, Belgium, 1579 - 1657), XIX century.
"Still life".
Oil on canvas.
Presents faults.
Measurements: 71 x 116 cm.
This canvas shows a still life of kitchen, composed by a number of elements located mostly in the foreground, with a style that is directly related to the baroque masters. The scene is clearly enclosed by a neutral background, furrowed by a dense shadow of tenebrist heritage, and a figure that deposits the food on the far right of the table. As was the case with many of the Baroque masters, especially the Dutch, here we see the elements that make up the still life arranged in a disorganized but clear manner on a flat surface that runs parallel to the lower margin of the painting.
During the 17th century in Flanders there was a growing demand for paintings to decorate the houses of the bourgeoisie. Apart from portraits and large canvases with religious, historical or mythological themes, artists specialized, painting medium-sized works that gradually increased in format, with still lifes, animals, landscapes and genre scenes. The paintings that reproduce collectors' cabinets of the time are explicit in this respect, to the point of originating a new autonomous pictorial genre. Undoubtedly, the future of this painting would have been different without Rubens, whose art revolutionized the artistic panorama of Flanders, introducing a new fully baroque way and bringing a sense of unity and opulent sumptuousness to the ordered and encyclopedic sample that were the precious descriptions of his countrymen. Debtors of his manner or subordinate to his work, the specialists worked in a new line, adding to their compositions an accessory object, a landscape or a decorative background. Frans Snyders (1579-1657), the great Flemish master of still life and animal painting, the genres most sought after as domestic ornament by Flemish clients, was close to this system of work and its technique. His compositions, like those of his followers, are presided over by an amplitude and a heroic tone that we can also appreciate in this canvas. In contrast to a current of traditional painters who followed the Flemish manner, the so-called static still life, represented by figures such as Clara Peeters (1594-1657) and Osias Beert (1580-1623), Snyders and his followers developed Rubenesque baroque applied to still life, through fully dynamic compositions, based on marked diagonals and animated with the presence of live animals, also endowed with greater elegance.