Three Monkeys Stealing Fruit

Antwerp in the 1640s no longer had its sea. The Dutch had closed the river Scheldt to the city's shipping, and the port that once made it rich was cut off, though its painters went on selling canvases across Europe. Snyders was in his sixties by then, the city's leading painter of animals and still life, and Rubens, whose hunting scenes and larders he had filled with game for years, had died in 1640. The specialist Hella Robels dates this picture to that decade, when Flemish painters began opening their still lifes onto open country, as this one does behind the raiders. Monkeys at a fruit basket meant greed and gluttony to the people who bought them, a joke with a moral attached. Snyders painted the subject more than once.