Still Life with Dead Game, Fruits, and Vegetables in a Market1614
This overflowing Flemish market stall is enlivened by dead animals splayed on the table, fighting roosters, and a pickpocket. More about this work
About this work
This overflowing Flemish market stall is enlivened by dead animals splayed on the table, fighting roosters, and a pickpocket. An early example of Frans Snyders’s combination of ornamental still-life elements with secondary figures, this scene might have adorned the dining room of an aristocratic collector. Snyders was the leading Flemish painter of monumental still lifes. He regularly collaborated with his fellow Antwerp artist Peter Paul Rubens.
Text from the Art Institute of Chicago.
What you’re looking at
An older man at left in red raises his hat toward a central table chaotically overflowing with dead game, fruits, and vegetables. The wings of dead birds and limbs of animals are splayed out at dramatic angles; a deer at center is suspended by his back legs. Live birds and a cat animate the scene.
Description from the Art Institute of Chicago.
How it was made
- Oil paint
- Pigment ground in a drying oil, usually linseed. It dries slowly, so painters could blend on the canvas, build up thin translucent glazes, and rework a picture over weeks. Canvas replaced wooden panels in the 1500s because it is lighter and can be rolled.
Frans Snyders
Flemish, 1579–1657
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Art Institute of Chicago has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1981.182
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Type
- Painting
- Department
- Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
