Still Life with Partridges

The canvas is signed and dated 1651 and measures 45 × 55 cm. The museum’s catalogue entry for the work records the bequest of C. A. and Maria Redin, with which it entered the collection in 1917, and lists it among the paintings shown in Stockholm in 1884 and again in 1933; the museum published technical notes on it after conservation treatment in 2008.

Jan Fyt (1611–1661) was born in Antwerp, trained there under Hans van den Bergh and afterwards in the workshop of Frans Snyders, and was admitted as a master of the Antwerp Guild of St Luke in 1629–30. He travelled in Italy in the 1630s and was in Paris in 1635, then settled again in his native city, where he built a European reputation on still lifes of game and hunting trophies, on flower pieces and on animal pictures, and took the genre Snyders had established into a more painterly and more opulent register. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.