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Dead Birds and Shot Bags
Pieter Boel (Flemish, 1622-1674)
c. 1660
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 32.6 × 43.3 cm (12 3/4 × 17 in.); Framed: 49.5 × 59.7 × 6.4 cm (19 1/2 × 23 1/2 × 2 1/2 in.)
- Culture
- Flanders
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- A. A. Munger Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Arranged in sinuous poses to emphasize individual feathers and decorative patterns in the plumage, the lifeless birds in this painting demonstrate the artist’s careful attention to reproducing the natural world. Pieter Boel, who specialized in the game still lifes popularized in the Southern Netherlands by Frans Snyders, executed highly naturalistic representations of fowl and canines during his years in Antwerp. The heightened shadows in this work reflect Boel’s study of Italian painting during a stay there in the 1640s.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
