A Hawk and a Brood Hen

Dated to 1646 and held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, A Hawk and a Brood Hen depicts predation upon domestic poultry — a subject that gave Snyders the opportunity to paint the hawk's aerial power against the hen's maternal defensiveness. The hen defending her chicks from a hawk was a charged subject in seventeenth-century iconography: Christ himself used the image of the hen gathering her chicks under her wings as a metaphor for divine protection (Matthew 23:37), and the hawk-and-hen subject therefore carried devotional as well as naturalistic meaning. The Budapest Museum of Fine Arts holds an important collection of Flemish Baroque works that entered Hungarian collections over the centuries. By 1646 Snyders was in his early sixties and producing canvases of refined economy and confidence. The contrast between the hawk's streamlined predatory form and the hen's domestic, rounded body was both a formal and an ethical opposition.

The composition centres on the moment of attack: the hawk descending or landed, the hen spreading her wings defensively over the chicks below. Snyders renders the hawk's plumage with his characteristic raptor precision — compact, aerodynamic feathers — while the hen's domestic plumage is looser and more varied in colour. The chicks huddled beneath the hen are painted with their characteristic downy, fluffy texture entirely different from adult feathers.