- 9
Frans Snijders
Description
- Frans Snyders
- still life of fruit in a basket together with game, a bowl of fraises-de-bois, artichokes, asparagus and a squirrel upon a table draped with a red cloth
- signed lower right: F. Snyders. Fecit
- oil on canvas
Provenance
Mr and Mrs Edgard Stern, Paris;
E.R.R. (Einsatzstab Reichsteiter Rosenberg für die Besetzten Gebiete), Paris, May 1940;
Reichsmarshall Herman Goering, 1941;
With Karl Haberstock, Berlin (acquired in exchange from the above), June 1941;
Baron Freiherr G. von Polnitz, Schloß Aschbach bei Bamberg;
Herman Shickman, New York, by 1968;
Gifted by the above to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1990;
Restituted to the heirs of Edgard Stern in 2000.
Exhibited
Literature
E. Greindl, Les Peintres Flamands de Nature morte au XVIIe Siècle, Brussels 1983, p. 375, no. 62;
H. Robels, Frans Snyders, Munich 1989, p. 228, no. 69, reproduced;
S. Koslow, Frans Snyders, Antwerp 1995, pp. 166-7, reproduced fig. 228.
Catalogue Note
By the second half of the 1630s, when this magnificent still life was painted, Snijders was at the height of his powers and his wealth and reputation securely established. By this date his style had achieved a new freedom, his looser and more confident brushwork matched by an increasingly rich and colourful palette. Many of the elements found in the present work recur in numerous other signed works which Koslow (see Literature, p. 163ff.) also dates to this period. The central basket of fruit, often with the animated squirrel shown here, was evidently a central motif in many works at this date, and appears with variations in a group of still lifes with comparable arrangements of game and vegetables in Berlin, Staatliche Museen; Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum; and Madrid, Museo del Prado (see Koslow, op. cit., pp. 174-8, reproduced figs. 242-3). Similar arrangements of porcelain bowls with raspberries or fraises-de-bois are equally to be found in the Berlin and Madrid canvases. The element of the fallow is, however, rather rarer. It appears again in a panel of similar size depicting A game larder with a married couple now in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, which Koslow (ibid., p. 171, reproduced fig. 232) accepts as autograph but Robels (see Literature, p. 429, cat. no. A.27) regards as a studio product.