Still Life with Dead Game

This 1661 game still life by Willem van Aelst, currently held by Richard Green Fine Paintings, exemplifies the mid-career period when the artist was at the peak of his technical facility and commercial success. The dead game still life — presenting the fruits of the hunt as an aristocratic trophy — was among the most socially prestigious subgenres of Dutch and Flemish still life painting in the seventeenth century. It required the painter to demonstrate mastery of textures that were challenging in different ways: feathers called for patience and fine brushwork, fur demanded an understanding of how individual hairs cluster and catch light, and metal required the confident application of bright highlights. Van Aelst's compositions from the early 1660s are often more dramatically lit than his earlier work, with a strong raking light source that throws deep shadows and isolates objects against a dark background.

Van Aelst builds his dark backgrounds with multiple transparent glazes of brown and black pigments, achieving depth and a slight warmth that prevents the shadows from feeling cold or flat. The game — bird or small mammal — is placed against this darkness to maximise contrast, and the light source, implied to come from the upper left, creates a clear modelling that emphasises three-dimensional form. Fur, where present, is rendered with a loaded brush dragged across the surface in the direction of growth, then refined with finer strokes.