Frans Snyders Circle

Circle of FRANS SNYDERS (Antwerp, 1579-1657)
"Kitchen still life".
Oil on canvas. Relined seventeenth century.
It has an important Spanish frame of the seventeenth century.
Measurements: 102 x 145 cm; 124 x 166 cm (frame).
Snyders created a type of scenes in domestic interiors, where the animals are the protagonists. Examples of this are paintings such as "A Pantry", created before 1636, or "Dog with Prey". Both belong to the collection of the Prado Museum in Madrid and have a similar theme to the present painting. In fact, this painting follows the compositional model of the painting entitled "La despensa". The protagonist is a dog in action. The sensation of immediacy in the animal's attack posture and the realism or almost humanization of the dog's reaction to the spectator, were characteristics created by Snyders that elevated this genre, which had not been valued until then.
Frans Snyders (1579-1657), the great Flemish master of still life and animals, the genres most sought after as domestic ornament by the Flemish clientele. 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. These are, in general, large format paintings, open to the landscape in the background, with rich and opulent scenes. They are fully baroque works, not only in the dynamic sense, but also because of their enormous size and great decorative sense. As in this canvas, in the works of Snyders, the objects are accumulated without any clarity, and are interpreted by means of very bright colors. Something frequent in the Flemish master's work is what we see here: animals arranged in two tiers, forming a compositional zigzag that reinforces the dynamism of the image. Live animals were also common in his works, as in this painting.