stillife with flowers, fruits and dead birds

This 1622 canvas from the Munich Central Collecting Point combines flowers, fruit, and dead birds in a genre-blending composition that reflects Snyders's ambition to unite multiple still-life subgenres. The inclusion of cut flowers alongside game birds was an unusual combination that pointed toward the vanitas tradition — the flowers' transience and the birds' mortality reinforcing each other within a single composition. In 1622 flower painting and bird painting were usually practised separately: specialists like Ambrosius Bosschaert handled flowers, while Snyders dominated bird and game subjects. This canvas suggests Snyders expanding into flower territory, perhaps in competition or collaboration with Jan Brueghel the Elder. The Munich Collecting Point works have complex provenance histories from the wartime period. The combination creates an unusual sensory richness: the perfume of flowers against the implicit feathers and game, the ephemerality of blossom against the permanent death of hunted birds.

The composition integrates the closed, curved forms of flower heads with the angular, elongated forms of birds — a challenging compositional exercise in contrast and unity. Flowers are rendered with Snyders's typically confident brushwork, though less botanically precise than the work of dedicated flower painters like Bosschaert. Dead birds are painted with his characteristic attention to plumage texture and species identification.