Two monkeys raiding a fruit basket

In the years this was painted, porcelain from China was arriving in northern Europe in quantities never seen before, and Antwerp's still-life painters liked to set it among their fruit. Snyders gives it rough treatment here. Two monkeys have come at a basket of fruit from both sides. The dark one, with a white ruff of fur, reaches up into the grapes while clutching a quince, and the paler one stretches a long arm in from the right. Between them the table is a wreck. A dish has tipped against a melon with its peaches spilling out, a bowl has rolled over with its berries, and fragments lie scattered on the cloth. The Louvre dates the canvas to between 1630 and 1640. It came to the museum in 1929 with the bequest of the baron de Christiani, a Paris collector.