_Frans Snyders_ (Flemish: 1579-1657).
Snyders was one of the principal Flemish painters of animals
and still life, and his talents were so much admired by Rubens
that the latter often employed him to paint fruit, game, and
other accessories in his pictures. Rubens in exchange sometimes
drew the figures in pictures by Snyders, whom, as a last proof
of affection, he appointed by will to manage the sale of his
works of art. Snyders received many commissions, too, from the
Archduke Albert and from Philip III. of Spain. His earlier
pictures were confined to representations--such as this one
of fruit and vegetables, or of dead game and fish. In the
establishment of his parents, who were proprietors of a large
eating-house, he had ample opportunity of studying such models.
"Snyders is not to be surpassed," says Sir F. Burton, "in
the painting of fruit. With his fine appreciation of colour,
and his large method of handling, he reproduced with few but
masterly touches the characteristic surface of each luscious
product of the garden, with greater truth to nature than was
generally attained by those painters who sought it by means of
minute and laborious imitation." Afterwards Snyders enlarged
his scope, and produced those scenes of the chase for which he
became celebrated. The vigour which Snyders threw into these
productions is extraordinary, but pictures of animals in savage
chase or butchered agony do not appeal to all tastes. "I know
no pictures," says Ruskin, "more shameful to humanity than the
boar and lion hunts of Rubens and Snyders, signs of disgrace
all the deeper because the powers desecrated are so great. The
painter of the village ale-house sign may, not dishonourably,
paint the fox-hunt for the village squire; but the occupation
of magnificent art power in giving semblance of perpetuity to
those bodily pangs which Nature has mercifully ordained to
be transient, and in forcing us, by the fascination of its
stormy skill, to dwell on that from which eyes of merciful
men should instinctively turn away, and eyes of high-minded
men scornfully, is dishonourable alike in the power which it
degrades, and the joy to which it betrays" (_Modern Painters_,
vol. v. pt. ix. ch. vi. § 19).