Still Life with Grapes and Game

A wicker basket overflows with luminous green, blue-black and ruby grapes on a table covered in scarlet cloth, surrounded by a tazza of black figs, a Wan-Li bowl of red grapes, and a brace of partridge, a splendid pheasant and a woodcock with a row of finches clamped between the halves of a stick — the fruit and game crowding the panel so vividly that they seem to spill past its edges. Frans Snyders created this new form of still life in early seventeenth-century Antwerp, combining fruit and game in one image with broad, firm brushwork and a palette of bright, direct colour, and he was held in such esteem that Peter Paul Rubens called on him to paint the still-life and animal elements of his own compositions. This remarkably well-preserved panel of about 1630 passed through an English country house, Horton Hall, for three generations before being purchased by the National Gallery of Art in 2006 with the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.