Portrait of Frans Snyders and his Wife

In Antwerp around 1621, painters were pressing a claim to be treated as learned men rather than tradesmen, and Rubens, who lived like a gentleman and wrote to scholars across Europe, was the standing proof that it could be done. Frans Snyders belonged to that circle. He was the specialist the big workshops called in for animals, dead game and heaped fruit, and he painted the beasts in a number of Rubens's canvases. Van Dyck, about 22 and working in the same city, had already portrayed Snyders and his wife Margaretha de Vos separately, in the two pictures now in the Frick Collection in New York, before setting them side by side here. Margaretha came from a painting family of her own. Her brothers Cornelis and Paul de Vos both worked in Antwerp. Kassel records that the canvas was cut down along the bottom early in its life, and a 17th-century drawing in Amsterdam already copies it in that state, with the woman's missing left hand sketched back in.