Frans Snijders (1579 –1657), Fishmarket in Antwerp, Oil on canvas, c.1620, 145 cm x 170 cm, Snijders & Rockoxhuis Museum, Antwerp
The indoor and outdoor fish markets of early seventeenth-century Antwerp were held at Het Steen, the medieval fortress on the Scheldt. Stalls along the quay sold freshwater fish pulled from the river, while sea fish arrived overland from the coast and was laid out on wooden tables nearby. On fast days and throughout Lent, when the consumption of meat was forbidden by the Church, demand for fish rose sharply, and the markets at Het Steen became some of the busiest commercial sites in the city. It is this scene, rooted in a very particular place and shaped by the rhythms of religious observance, that Frans Snijders painted around 1620.
The painting resists easy genre classification, and that resistance is itself revealing. It is not a pure still life, since figures occupy the scene and the setting is an identifiable urban location rather than a neutral tabletop or pantry shelf. Nor is it straightforwardly a genre painting in the sense of an everyday social scene, since the massed display of fish and the close attention to their species, textures, and surfaces are unmistakably the work of a still-life specialist. Elizabeth Honig, in her study of painting and the Antwerp market, has argued that Snijders was the central figure in a broader transformation: the market scene, as practised by Pieter Aertsen (c.1508–1575) and Joachim Beuckelaer (c.1533–c.1574), had been organised around exchange, transaction, and the social energies of buying and selling (Honig, 1998). In Snijders’s hands, the genre shifted towards display and possession. Goods are no longer being negotiated over; they are presented, with a stillness and an opulence that push the composition towards what scholars have called the pronkstilleven, the sumptuous still life that Snijders and his contemporary Adriaen van Utrecht are credited with originating in Antwerp (Koslow, 1995). This painting sits at the hinge between the two: a market scene whose pictorial logic is already that of a still life.
The complexity of the format was not incidental. It reflected the competitive and highly specialised art market in Antwerp, where painters routinely collaborated across disciplines to produce works of a density and variety that no single artist could easily match. The practice of collaborative painting was, as Honig and others have emphasised, distinctively Antwerp; it differed both from the interstudio rivalry of Italian workshop culture and from the single-master niche production that prevailed in Holland (Honig, 1998; Woollett and Van Suchtelen, 2006). Snijders’s market scenes were collaborative productions almost by definition. He supplied the fish, game, and still-life passages; the human figures were typically painted by Cornelis de Vos (1584–1651), his brother-in-law (Snijders had married Margriete de Vos in 1611), and on at least one occasion by Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641). The arrangement was reciprocal: Rubens, Jordaens, and Abraham Janssens all called on Snijders to contribute animals and still-life elements to their own compositions (Snijders & Rockoxhuis, 2020). A painting by two or more named masters was not a compromise or a shortcut. It was a selling point, a demonstration that the collector could commission work from an entire network of leading artists, each operating at the top of his specialism. For an artist of Snijders’s standing, a fish market populated only by fish and figures, without the layering of topographical detail, proverbial allusion, and collaborative virtuosity, would not have met the expectations of his audience.
The painting displays an impressive array of freshwater and saltwater fish, rendered with close attention to colour, texture, and anatomical detail. The museum’s guide notes that sea fish, dominated by cod and sturgeon, occupy the right-hand table, while wooden and copper tubs on the left hold fish from the Scheldt, including carp (Snijders & Rockoxhuis, 2020). Snijders painted fish with a distinctively loose, wet-looking brushstroke, a technique calculated to suggest the sheen and freshness of the catch. An old man bends over one of the containers, his figure grounding the composition in the physical labour of the market. In the centre hangs an empty balance, its pans level and unweighted. In the background, Het Steen and the tower of the Cathedral of Our Lady are clearly visible, and beyond them a stretch of shore where further cargo appears to be arriving by boat, extending the painting’s spatial narrative from the immediate market stall outward to the river and the wider trade network on which it depended. Het Steen was the actual site of the fish markets, so the background anchors the foreground in a specific, identifiable location, and the incoming boats reinforce the subject’s dependence on the Scheldt and on Antwerp’s continued, if diminished, access to waterborne commerce.
Beneath the table, a cat furtively steals a fish, adding a moment of sly comedy that does more work than it first appears. The painting’s allusive details would not have been lost on contemporary viewers. In the visual and literary culture of the Low Countries, cats were firmly associated with theft, cunning, and unruly appetite. The convention of the cat disrupting a still life or market display was grounded in Flemish animal painting and persisted well into the eighteenth century. Clara Peeters (1594–1657), Snijders’s Antwerp contemporary, repeatedly included cats stealing food from her tabletop compositions, and her fish-and-cat arrangements have been read as playing on the symbolic opposition between the fish as an ancient Christian symbol and the cat as a figure of temptation. The motif also drew on the Netherlandish proverbial culture that Pieter Bruegel the Elder had visualised so memorably in his Netherlandish Proverbs (1559), a work Snijders would certainly have known through the numerous copies produced by his own teacher, Pieter Brueghel the Younger. Several Dutch and Flemish proverbs featured cats and fish directly: de kat bij de vis zetten (to set the cat by the fish) warned against putting a thief in charge of what he covets, while als de kat van huis is, dansen de muizen op tafel (when the cat is away, the mice dance on the table) played on the idea of unguarded plenty inviting opportunism. In a market scene, the thieving cat could function on several levels at once: as a comic naturalistic incident, as a moralising emblem of appetite unchecked, and as a proverbial allusion to the folly of leaving goods unattended. What can be said is that contemporary viewers, steeped in a culture of proverbs, emblem books, and the Bruegel tradition, would have registered the motif as something more than incidental observation.
The empty balance hanging at the centre of the composition operates in a similar way. As a practical instrument of the fish trade, it is entirely at home in the market setting and would need no further explanation. But the weighing scale also carried a dense iconographic history. Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (first published 1593), the standard handbook of personified concepts, lists the balance as an attribute of Justice, Equity, and Righteousness. Vermeer would later paint an empty balance in his Woman Holding a Balance (c.1662–1663, National Gallery of Art, Washington), a composition in which, as Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. has argued, the level, unweighted pans convey temperance and the idea of balanced judgement rather than material transaction. Snijders was not Vermeer, and the fish market is not a domestic interior; there is no reason to assume so deliberate an allegorical programme here. But the convention of the suspended, empty balance was available to Antwerp painters and their audiences, and its placement at the centre of the composition, between abundance below and civic landmarks above, invites a reading that goes beyond the purely descriptive. Is this a statement about fair dealing? A reminder of judgement set against material plenty? Or simply a scale that has not yet been used?
The subject had deep roots in Antwerp painting. Pieter Aertsen had pioneered monumental market and kitchen scenes in the mid-sixteenth century, placing food and commerce in the foreground while relegating biblical episodes to the background. His nephew and pupil Beuckelaer developed the format further, painting fish markets that doubled as moral allegories, often including small background scenes of Christ in the House of Martha and Mary or the Miraculous Draught of Fishes (Moxey, 1976). Snijders inherited this tradition but stripped away the overt religious insets that had characterised the earlier works, enlarging the scale, intensifying the naturalism, and replacing the biblical background with civic landmarks and the arriving boats that extend the scene towards the river. The moral dimension did not disappear; it migrated into the incidental details, the cat, the empty scale, the proverbial associations that an Antwerp audience would have carried with them as instinctively as they knew the proverbs themselves.
Antwerp’s prosperity had long depended on the Scheldt, and the choice of the fish market as a subject carried civic weight. After the Fall of Antwerp in 1585, Dutch forces progressively established control over the river’s estuary, restricting access to the port. The Twelve Years’ Truce (1609–1621) brought a general improvement in conditions: hostilities ceased, overland trade resumed, and artistic commissions flourished. The Scheldt blockade itself, however, was not lifted. The States of Zeeland insisted on maintaining it throughout the Truce, and the Dutch Republic’s refusal to reopen the river was among the conditions that caused negotiations for renewal to collapse in 1621 (Israel, 1995). Scenes of abundant fish and busy commerce, painted during or shortly after the Truce, also carried a particular charge in this context. The background of this painting makes the point visually: boats arriving at the shore, cargo being brought in, the city’s landmarks presiding over the whole scene. The fish are not simply there; they have come from somewhere, and the infrastructure of their arrival is on display. The museum’s guide notes that Snijders’s still lifes and market scenes were understood as supporting Antwerp’s reviving economic prosperity during the Truce (Snijders & Rockoxhuis, 2020), and the inclusion of Het Steen, the Cathedral tower, and the working shore was not merely civic decoration but a pointed assertion of the city’s identity as a river port and trading centre, however beleaguered.
References
Baatsen, I., Blondé, B. and De Groot, J. (2014) ‘The Kitchen between Representation and Everyday Experience: The Case of Sixteenth-Century Antwerp’, in Göttler, C., Ramakers, B. and Woodall, J. (eds.) Trading Values in Early Modern Antwerp. Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek / Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, 64. Leiden: Brill, pp. 162–184.Available at: https://www.academia.edu/12064497/The_kitchen_between_representation_and_everyday_experience_the_case_of_sixteenth_century_Antwerp_Published_in_NKJ_2014 (Accessed 29 April 2024)
Honig, E.A. (1998) Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Honig, E.A. (1995) ‘The Beholder as a Work of Art: A Study in the Location of Value in Seventeenth-Century Flemish Painting’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 46, pp. 252–297.Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/i40159427 (Accessed 29 April 2024)
Israel, J.I. (1995) The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Koslow, S. (1995) Frans Snyders: The Noble Estate. Seventeenth-Century Still-Life and Animal Painting in the Southern Netherlands. Antwerp: Fonds Mercator. Revised edition, Brussels: Fonds Mercator, 2006.
Moxey, K.P.F. (1977) Pieter Aertsen, Joachim Beuckelaer, and the Rise of Secular Painting in the Context of the Reformation. New York: Garland
Snijders & Rockoxhuis (2020) Visitors Guide. Antwerp: KBC Group
Woollett, A.T. and Van Suchtelen, A. (2006) Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship. Exhibition catalogue. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum; The Hague: Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis
Balis, A. et al. (eds.) (2021) Many Antwerp Hands: Collaborations in Netherlandish Art, 1400–1750. Turnhout: Brepols