Peter Snayers

Variant namesauktoriserad namnform: Peter Snayers stavningsvariant: Peter Snaijers stavningsvariant: Peeter Snayers

DatesBiographical dates: 1592 Dead: dead after 1666 Born: born 1592

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BiographyBiography: Painter of battles and hunting scenes. Although not listed as such in the records of the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke, Snayers was an apprentice of the painter Sebastiaen Vrancx, who created the genre of battle scenes in the Netherlands. In 1612/1613 Snayers became a master in the Antwerp guild. In 1618 he married a niece of the painter Cornelis Schut, in 1620/1621 he became a member of the Antwerp chamber of rhetoric, De Violieren, and he continued to live in his native city until the second half of the 1620s, regularly paying his dues to the guild until 1625/1626. On 16 June 1628 he obtained citizenship of Brussels and became a master in the local painters’ guild. Although never officially appointed court painter to the Spanish Habsburg governors of the Netherlands, the Archdukes Albert and Isabella Clara Eugenia, Snayers worked for the Infanta on several occasions, which may explain his move to Brussels. Snayers was highly appreciated by the aristocratic circles around the Brussels court. He subsequently became court painter to the Cardinal- Infante Ferdinand of Austria as well as Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. Snayers died at Brussels, a wealthy man, shortly after 1666. The sale of his collection of paintings, in June of 1675, after the death of his widow, included no fewer than 427 paintings. During his early Antwerp period, Snayers adopted the style and subject matter of his master, Vrancx, painting lively and colourful scenes of soldiers’ skirmishes and robberies on country roads. For the rest of his career he specialized in large aerial depictions of historical sieges and battlefields from the contempo- rary conflicts, recording the most important events of the Thirty Years’ War. A highly talented and prolific military painter, Snayers presumably never visited a battlefield, and painted his battle scenes using official military topographical maps. His battlefield paintings are represented in museum collections in Brussels, Dresden, Madrid, Schleissheim, Turin and Vienna. Snayers also painted equestrian portraits of important personages of his time, the Marqués de Leganés, Ambrogio Spinola and the Comte de Bucquoy (Rohrau, Harrasche Galerie). Peter Paul Rubens chose him as a collaborator for two paintings in the series of the Life of Henry IV of 1628–1630, (Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen), and he also contributed a series of hunting scenes to the decoration, in 1636–1638, of the Torre de la Parada, the hunting lodge outside Madrid of the Spanish king Philip IV. In his later years, Snayers painted large and impressive landscapes, some of which date as late as 1662. Snayers had several apprentices in Brussels from 1637 onwards, among them Adam Frans van der Meulen, who became his pupil in 1646. His works are sometimes mistaken for those of the battle scene painter Pieter Meulener, who may have been his pupil.

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