1579 -1657 · Flemish Baroque, animals, hunts and still lifes

Game, fruit, markets, animal fights and spectacular abundance make Frans Snyders the great Flemish painter of living and dead nature.

Frans Snyders was born in Antwerp in 1579. He trained with Pieter Brueghel the Younger then Hendrick van Balen and became master of the guild of Saint-Luc in 1602. After a stay in Italy, he returned to Antwerp and built a specialty new: vast still lifes of markets, pantries and hunting where fruits, vegetables, fish, birds and game fill the space with monumental energy. Snyders does not just inventory the richness of the natural world. He animates objects with diagonals, falls, open beaks, outstretched legs and oppositions of textures. His hunting scenes concentrate the action at the moment when the dogs surround the deer and the deer or the wild boar. This knowledge of animals earned him numerous collaborations with Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens, for whom he painted fauna, fruits and accessories in shared compositions. Royal commissions, notably those intended for the Torre de la Parada of Philip IV of Spain, spread his art on a European scale. His large workshop produced variations and attracted numerous copies. He died in Antwerp in 1657. More than three hundred paintings, around a hundred drawings and numerous studies. He died in Antwerp in 1657. More than three hundred paintings, around a hundred drawings and numerous studies. He died in Antwerp in 1657. More than three hundred paintings, around a hundred drawings and numerous studies bear witness to the scale of a work which elevated still life and animal painting to the rank of a great baroque spectacle. The "Frans Snyders" selection notably highlights look Deer hunting and Suede hunting. His reading favors the material.

In Snyders, still life never remains still: fruits, feathers, furs and muscles still seem to be carried by a vital force.