A Game Stall

Snyders painted this in Antwerp somewhere between 1625 and 1635, on a canvas two and a half metres wide, a size made for the long wall of a dining room in a merchant's house. What covers the table is game and poultry, and hunting in the Habsburg Netherlands was a noble privilege, so venison and wildfowl reached a city table by gift, by estate, or through a licensed dealer. A kitchen boy has been left to mind the lot. Snyders had been painting the animals in Rubens's large commissions for years and ran his own workshop on exactly this subject, supplying a city whose money wanted its abundance shown at full size. F. D. Lycett Green gave the picture to York in 1955 along with well over a hundred other old masters.