Market scene with fruit and vegetables, and an amorous couple

A monkey on the counter is sampling the fruit, one piece after another, at random. The Alte Pinakothek reads the whole stall as a picture with a double meaning, and the monkey stands for giving in to desire. The message points at the couple in the background. The market woman holds out a fig, an old sign for the female sex, and the young man carries a hare, an animal thought to be especially fertile. In Dutch, de haas jagen, to hunt the hare, was a saying for making love. Even the dog with its nose down, sniffing, belongs to the theme of the senses leading people astray. Snyders painted this on a canvas more than three metres wide, sometime between 1625 and 1630. It came to Munich in 1844 from the Stone Hall of the former prince-bishops' residence in Freising.