Fish market

No real stall ever held all of this at once. Rays, crabs, oysters, eels, a lobster, turtles and even a seal fill a canvas more than three and a half metres wide, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum reads it as an allegory of water, an inventory of what the sea provides. In the picture tradition of the time a fish market could also stand for winter. Frans Snyders painted the animals with such precision that each species can still be named, in keeping with the period's appetite for natural history. The two people are by another hand. Cornelis de Vos, a portrait painter and Snyders's brother-in-law, painted the bearded fishmonger holding up the lobster and the boy tipping a basin of fish into a tub. The canvas later belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor in Brussels, whose collection went to Vienna.