Lot 8
  • 8

Frans Snijders Antwerp 1579 - 1657

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Description

  • Frans Snyders
  • A still life of fruit in a basket, flanked by melons, grapes and figs, partridge, all on a ledge draped in a red cloth, with a hare suspended from a nail to the left
  • oil on oak panel

Provenance

With Dowdeswell Galleries, London;
Acquired from the above by Max and Fanny Steinthal in May 1910;
Seized by the Third Reich at their deaths:
Thence in the possession of the son-in-law of the above, until 1950;
Impounded by the East German authorities in 1950;
Dresden, Gemäldegalerie, by 1950;
Restituted to the heirs of Max and Fanny Steinthal in 2004.

Exhibited

Berlin, Ausstellung von Werken Alter Kunst aus dem Privatbesitz von Mitgliedern des Kaiser Friedrich-Museums-Vereins, 1914, no. 158;
Berlin, Jüdisches Museum, Max Steinthal. Ein Bankier und seine Bilder, 2004, p. 54

Catalogue Note

We are grateful to Fred G. Meijer for confirming that this is an entirely autograph work by Frans Snijders.  Another version, on canvas (112.5 by 125 cm.), with a white cloth instead of a red one, was with Dowdeswell, London, and a variant of wider format, with flowers in a glass vase, a bowl of strawberries to the left, and a larger bowl of strawberries to the right (on canvas, 117 by 177 cm.), is in the Kurhessische Hausstiftung, Schloß Friedrichshof, Kronberg-im-Taunus (see H. Robels, Frans Snyders, Augsburg 1989, pp. 276-7, nos. 155 I and II, the second reproduced p. 278). A third version, on a canvas measuring 130 by 120 cm., was exhibited at Galerie Sanct Lucas, Vienna, in 1969.

Although the almost square format is unusual for Snijders, the grain of the panel runs vertically, suggesting that the dimensions have not been altered from a rectangle.  An early drawn copy, in Sniiders' style and probably done in his studio as a ricordo, in Turin, Biblioteca Reale (inv. no. 16363) shows that about two centimetres may be missing from the right-hand edge, since in the drawing about 3/4 of the elaborate urn and the entire wing of the partridge are visible next to the right edge of the composition.