Still Life With Birds And Raisins, Workshop Of Frans Snyders (1579-1657)

Still life with birds and grapes
Workshop of Frans Snyders (Antwerp, 1579-1657)
17th century Antwerp school

Oil on oak panel (cradled).
Dimensions: h. 55 cm, w. 80 cm
Baroque-style gilded wood frame, 
Framed dimensions: h. 73 cm, l. 98 cm

An exquisite and appealing work, our painting's rich, harmonious composition is one of the outstanding examples of 17th-century art lovers' passion for still lifes, a genre in full bloom in Antwerp in the early 17th century, long before it appeared in Paris in the 1630s-40s.
On an entablature covered with wine-red velvet, our painting presents a variety of objects in a spontaneous, artistic arrangement.
The tight, extract-like framing and piled-up objects suggest a plenitude and infinite richness of what nature has to offer, and reinforce the sense of prosperity.
The wicker basket overflowing with bunches of translucent grapes in icy green and purplish hues dominates the right-hand side of the picture.
In the center are game birds, partridge, snipe, sparrow, pincock and others, each with a fine, precise design, transparent plumage, meticulous rendering of the different parts of the beak or legs, zebra patterns and streaks of down.
To the left, two stacked white and blue Wan-li bowls in Chinese porcelain, featuring bright red langoustines.
The bowl leaning to the left and the basket leaning to the right bring a kind of symmetry to the composition, enclosing it and forcing the viewer to contemplate the painting.
The gaze never ceases to land on the bunches of grapes, whose irresistibly velvety, translucent fruits bring incredible vitality to the composition.
The surprising lightness of the brushstrokes to illustrate the transparency of two wine glasses, barely visible, whose shape is outlined against a black background in the background.
The stoneware pitcher in warm ochre and the vermeil salt shaker fill the left-hand background.
Intense light focused on objects standing out against a dark background creates contrasts reinforced by the white of the porcelain, feathers and grape skins.

With remarkable finesse, the artist strives to paint the feathers and down of the birds to achieve a highly realistic effect. These many tiny strokes are painted with brushes that have only a single bristle. This incredible meticulousness reveals the painter's talent and patience.
The way surfaces and materials are treated evokes a great mastery of the brush.

Our work is an identically-sized studio reproduction of the painting by Frans Snyders held in a private collection, Christie's New-York sale, 4/6/2014 (realized price $461,000).
A variant of this composition with the identical basket of grapes and game by Frans Snyders was sold at Lempertz, Cologne, Germany, 11/14/2020 (realized price €143,750).

Frans Snyders (Antwerp, 1579-1657)
Frans Snyders entered Peter Brueghel II's studio in 1593, at the age of 14. Mastered in 1602, he traveled to Italy, first to Rome and then to Milan. Back in Antwerp, he specialized in still lifes, and his reputation spread rapidly, to the point that Rubens called on him between 1611 and 1616 to collaborate on some of his works. Having married Marguerite de Vos, sister of Cornelis and Paul de Vos, in 1611, he had a considerable influence on the latter. A member of the Romanist Society in Antwerp in 1619, he became its dean in 1628. He established himself as one of the most important and recognized painters of his time, receiving numerous prestigious commissions. As the corpus of his paintings was quite large, he worked with many collaborators in his studio, and his best-known pupils were Paul de Vos, Nicasius Bernaerts and Jan Fyt.