Dead Birds and Shot Bags

Pieter Boel, born in Antwerp in 1622, carried the Flemish hunting still life into the France of Louis XIV: from 1668 he served as painter of animals to the Gobelins manufactory, supplying the models Charles Le Brun followed in the tapestries of the King’s Hunts, and his dead-game pieces shaped both Oudry and Chardin. This still life of dead birds and shot bags dates from about 1660, his Antwerp years, when he was consolidating the grave, tightly composed manner — game suspended against a plain dark ground — that made his reputation. The subject descends from the market pieces of Snyders, but Boel’s quieter, more elegiac treatment handed the genre to the eighteenth century. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.