The powerful personality of Rubens dominated the art of Flanders
during the seventeenth century. His direct or indirect influence is
traceable in the art of most of his contemporaries and of the painters
of the next generation, who divided his artistic heritage without
attaining to his universality. Thus his collaborator Frans Snyders
(1579-1657), after studying under “Hell Brueghel” and H. van Balen,
acquired the bravura of his brushwork and his unrivalled skill in
depicting animals in violent movement from Rubens, in whose pictures
of the chase he frequently painted the animals, whilst he often had to
seek the assistance of other painters for the figures introduced into
his own compositions. Among the thirteen pictures from his brush at
the Louvre (Nos. 2141-2153) the _Wild Boar Hunt_ (No. 2144) serves
best to illustrate Snyders’s power to suggest the furious onrush and
wild excitement of the chase. His skill as a still-life painter may be
judged from the masterly treatment of the wet glittering fish in the
large _Fish Merchants_ (No. 2145).