Still life with a boy

Still lifes of game and fruit usually belong to the kitchen or the market stall. Around 1650 Jan Fyt moved his into a palace. On a canvas more than two metres wide he set palatial architecture and a view into a park, musical instruments, a peacock and costly vases, the furnishings of a noble house. The youth among all this was probably painted by a colleague. The museum gives the figure to Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert, an Antwerp figure painter, although it was once attributed to another Antwerp artist, Jan Erasmus Quellinus. Splitting a canvas between specialists like this was ordinary practice in Antwerp workshops. Fyt signed his own share in an easily missed spot, on the music book at the bottom left, where it reads Ioannes Fyt F.