Paul de Vos

In 1611 Margaretha de Vos married the Antwerp animal painter Frans Snyders. Her brother Paul was still in training at the time, and he spent the rest of his long career inside that family circle. He worked in Snyders's workshop and painted dogs, deer and boar in the same fierce manner, so that pictures by the two men are still sometimes confused.

The circle went wider than one brother-in-law. His older brother Cornelis de Vos was a successful portrait painter in the same city. Paul collaborated with Rubens, the leading painter of Antwerp, and when his own son was born in 1628 the boy was named Peter Paul, with Rubens as his godfather.

Many of his buyers were in Spain. The Count of Arenberg, a Flemish nobleman then living in Madrid, ordered at least 36 pictures of birds, hunts and fables from him between 1633 and 1640. In 1637 and 1638 de Vos painted for two residences of King Philip IV, the Buen Retiro palace in Madrid and the Torre de la Parada, a royal hunting lodge nearby, where most of the animal scenes without human figures were his. A large share of those royal canvases is now in the Prado.