Fruit and Vegetables with a Monkey, Parrot and Squirrel

In 1794 revolutionary officials in Paris seized the pictures of the baron de Breteuil, one of Louis XVI's ministers, who had left France, and this panel was number two on their list. The clerk wrote the painter's name as Sanders. By 1797 it was in the new public museum at the Louvre. Snyders had painted it in Antwerp in the 1620s, a table heaped with melons, gourds, grapes, figs and redcurrants. At the lower left lie cobs of maize, a crop that had come to Europe from the Americas. A grey parrot pecks at the fruit, a squirrel feeds in the foreground, and a monkey peers out of the shadow on the right. The Louvre notes that the same three animals appear together in a painting by Snyders in Dublin.