Natura morta con una domestica

Frans Snyders worked in Antwerp, and he more or less invented the kind of picture you're looking at: the lavish Flemish larder scene, piled with fruit, game and a servant, made to show off a household's wealth. Antwerp in the 1630s was a rich merchant city, and this abundance was exactly what its buyers wanted on their walls. Snyders also filled the table with quiet meanings a contemporary would have caught. The figs the maid carries, the monkey sniffing a carnation, the parrot pecking an apricot were all old emblems of love, marriage and fertility. Snyders was so good at animals and still life that Peter Paul Rubens, the most famous painter in the city, regularly hired him to paint those parts of his own canvases. The two were friends and near neighbours for years.