Still Life with Dead Birds and Game Bag

Painted in 1674 and held in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, this Still Life with Dead Birds and Game Bag represents Van Aelst's late career, when his game compositions had reached a refined austerity. The Getty acquired this work as part of its significant collection of European still life, which traces the genre from its Flemish origins through its Dutch Golden Age flowering. By 1674, Van Aelst was in his late fifties and had been painting hunting still lifes for over three decades; the compositions from this late period tend to be more restrained in the number of objects, more concentrated in their lighting, and more assured in their handling than the occasionally more crowded works of the 1650s. The velvet bag is a recurring prop in Van Aelst's hunting still lifes — it signals the social register of the hunt (velvet being an expensive textile) and provides a surface that absorbs rather than reflects light, creating a rich dark mass against which the paler objects can be read clearly.

Late Van Aelst paintings show increased confidence in the handling of the darkest values, which are built up with pure asphaltum or brown glazes to a depth that absorbs light while remaining transparent. The velvet bag is rendered with a distinctive surface: no bright highlights, a slight sheen only at the folds where the pile is compressed, and a rich, deep colour that reads as luxury without gloss. Dead birds are painted with the accumulated efficiency of thirty years of practice, each feather type handled quickly but accurately.