A still life with fish, such as a lobster, salmon and oysters, a cat luring in the background

Dated to 1611 and held in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, this panel still life with fish, lobster, salmon, oysters, and a lurking cat represents one of Snyders's earliest surviving major works. The fish and seafood still life was a distinct subgenre within Flemish still-life painting, requiring different skills from the game and fruit compositions: the specific iridescence of fish scales, the translucency of oyster flesh, and the matt opacity of crustacean shells each demanded different technical approaches. The cat at the background edge serves as a narrative element introducing movement and predatory tension into an otherwise static display — a device Snyders used repeatedly throughout his career. In 1611 Snyders was in his mid-twenties and had recently established his independent workshop after training under Hendrick van Balen. This early work already demonstrates the compositional ambition and textural virtuosity that would define his mature output. The Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels hold some of the most important examples of Snyders's work, and this early panel gives a sense of his development at the start of his long career.

The panel surface allows Snyders to render the specific reflective quality of fish scales with fine, overlapping strokes of varying tone. The lobster's red, the oysters' grey-white, and the salmon's pink create an unusual chromatic range for a predominantly cool composition. The cat is rendered more loosely in the background, deliberately softened to push it spatially into the middle distance.