Fleurs et gibier mort devant un paysage

Three dead birds lie in the foreground beside a bouquet of flowers, set before a landscape of ancient ruins; behind them, to the left, a partridge hangs by its legs from a large earthenware pot. The still life sits in a pastoral of antique fragments, the flowers and game painted with the smooth, detailed finish and warm light that made Jan Weenix the leading Dutch painter of hunting still lifes and garden views in the later seventeenth century. The son of the marine painter Jan Baptist Weenix, he worked in Amsterdam and for aristocratic patrons, filling his pictures — like this one from the Petit Palais — with the sun-warmed mood of the Italianate landscape tradition his father had brought back from Rome. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.