Still Life with Grapes and Game

Frans Snyders

National Gallery of Art

A basket overflowing with grapes and surrounded by dead birds and more fruit sits on a long table covered in a scarlet-red cloth in this horizontal still life painting. In the basket at the center of the painting, luminous green, blue-black, red, and purple grapes are piled up in a rough pyramid that overflows the sides. Long stems with broad sage and celery-green leaves edged with brown jut up above and to the side of the bunches of grapes, nearly touching the top edge of the painting. Just in front of the basket to our left, a bowl overflowing with a bunch of purple grapes is tipped toward us. The inside of the bowl is painted with cobalt-blue, geometric, vegetal designs against a white background. Behind it, at the far left, a tall, bronze, footed serving dish stacked high with pale green and black-skinned figs is cut off by the left edge of the composition. In front of and to the right of the central basket, the bodies of about two dozen small and medium-sized birds fill the right half of the tabletop. About ten small birds are arranged along a stick between a pair of dead birds to our left and a pile of several larger birds to our right. The birds’ feathers and bodies are painted in shades of cream and parchment white, ink black, ruby red, tawny brown, and butter and golden yellow. The fruit and birds are lit from the upper left, and the backround is earth brown.