Frans Snyders

Variant namesauktoriserad namnform: Frans Snyders

DatesBiographical dates: 1579 - 1657 Dead: dead 1657 Born: born 1579

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BiographyBiography: Painter of animals, hunts and still lifes. Active at Antwerp, where he was apprenticed to Pieter Brueghel II in 1593. According to an inscription accompanying his portrait in J. Meyssens’ Images de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (1649), Frans Snyders was also a pupil of Hendrick van Balen. He became a master in the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke in 1602. In early 1608 he travelled to Rome, and then to Milan: on September 26, 1608, Jan Brueghel I wrote to Cardinal Federico Borromeo in Milan, and to his secretary Ercole Bianchi, that Snyders was on his way there from Rome. Brueghel’s warm praise (“one of the best painters of Antwerp”) gained Snyders the important patronage of the Cardinal. By July 4, 1609, Snyders had returned to Antwerp, where he married Margriete de Vos, sister of the painters Cornelis and Paul de Vos, on October 23, 1611. He joined the exclusive Guild of Romanists in 1619 and was elected Dean in 1628. Snyders’ work was highly esteemed during his lifetime, and he carried out work for the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, for the City of Antwerp, the States-General in Brussels and Dudley Carlton, English ambassador to the United Provinces at The Hague. Snyders died at Antwerp, a successful and wealthy painter. Snyders painted still lifes with vegetables, fruit and game. He gained a reputation for his ability to represent game, especially dead game, and his game pieces fetched high prices in the market. Calling Snyders an innovator of still life, Greindl (1983) asserted that from the earliest stage of his career his conception of still life was fundamentally different from that of his contemporaries. Pointing to the spatial construction and vitality of his pictures, she identified his style as Baroque, and his sensitivity to colour made him “one of the greatest colourists of the Flemish school”. The most powerful artistic force acting on Snyders, according to both Greindl and Robels (1989), was Peter Paul Rubens, who furnished him with key compositional ideas. Dated works by Snyders, unfortunately quite rare, range from 1603 to 1651, while motifs and colours hardly change during the course of his lengthy career. Nevertheless, Robels (1969, 1989) constructed a credible chronology for his oeuvre. By the early to mid-1610s, Snyders’ characteristic personal style, with its flowing movement and glowing colours, had reached full maturity. In the 1630s, tonal unity appears together with a warmer palette, paralleling Rubens’ colouristic preferences in the same decade; the pictures are also more monumental than in the 1620s. Snyders’ transformation of the large kitchen-market type of still lifes by Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer into a Baroque idiom was decisive for such Flemish specialists as Adriaen van Utrecht, Paul de Vos and Jan Fyt. He was also famous for his lively depictions of animals in hunting and genre scenes, the earliest of which date from around 1615. Cornelis de Bie (1662) thus praised the artist for his life-like hunting scenes: “See Snyders at the hunt, how beautifully done after life, /he knew how to give great fame to this sweet art”. Judging from the many contemporary copies made of his paintings, Snyders must have run a sizeable workshop. Although only three apprentices are inscribed in the guild registry (Melchior Weldenck, 1609; Hendrik Joris, 1616; and Nicasius Bernaerts, 1633), there certainly were others, including his brother-in-law Paul de Vos, who followed his style in still lifes and hunting scenes, and Jan Fyt, who continued working with Snyders even after becoming an independent master in 1629. Snyders worked with Rubens, with whom he collaborated, in 1637–1638, on the decoration of mythologies and hunting scenes for the Torre de la Parada, the hunting lodge of King Philip IV of Spain, and who recruited him from time to time to paint still life elements and live animals in his larger compositions. He also collaborated frequently with the landscape specialist Jan Wildens and with Anthony van Dyck, Cornelis de Vos, Abraham Janssens, Jacob Jordaens and others.

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