Still Life with Grapes and Game, Frans Snyders
In the National Gallery of Art, DC.
According to the legend for this piece on the NGA website, still life featuring game and still life in which the primary subject was fruit were considered separate subjects until Snyders started combining them in the early 17th century.
Snyders himself moved from painting still life to becoming a painter of animals. He sometimes collaborated with other artists, such as Peter Paul Rubens, to paint animals into compositions in which the other artist had painted the primary work and the figures, such as the striking painting, Prometheus Bound in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
I really like Snyders’ still life paintings, however, particularly in his confident, economical brushwork, as in the grapes in this piece, which almost seem to anticipate the still life approach of Manet centuries later.
