Kitchen interior with a servant girl holding a plate with poultry and a table with an abundance of game, fish, fruit and vegetables

Antwerp in the 1630s liked to show what it could put on a table, and Frans Snyders built a career on exactly that. This kitchen from 1634 reads less as a scene than as an inventory. Dead game, fish, poultry, fruit and vegetables are heaped and hung in such quantity that the young servant girl holding out a plate of birds is nearly lost among them. Snyders was the specialist other painters called in when a picture needed animals and still life done convincingly, and he ran a busy workshop turning out larders and market stalls like this one. For a wealthy merchant household the appeal was plain. A wall like this announced a kitchen that never ran short. That same precision made him a regular partner of Rubens, the hand that painted the animals and fruit in many pictures the more famous man signed.