Follower of Frans Sneyders

Follower of FRANS SNYDERS (Antwerp, Belgium, 1579 - 1657); end of XVIII-XIX century.
"Still life".
Oil on canvas.
It presents restorations in the pictorial surface.
Measurements: 118 x 148 cm.
In the present work the scene has been placed in an interior in which stands out a window that lets see a leaden sky. Even so, the author focuses the viewer's attention on a large number of elements placed on a simple wooden table. 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 orderly and encyclopedic sample that were the precious descriptions of his countrymen.
Frans Snyders (1579-1657), the great Flemish master of still life and animal painting, the genres most in demand as domestic ornament by the Flemish clientele, approached 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.
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.