The Christ Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist and Angels

The Christ Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist and Angels, 1616, in the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, represents Snyders participating in the devotional genre painting that was a secondary but significant part of his output alongside his secular still-life and hunt subjects. The scene belongs to the type of sacra conversazione in which sacred childhood figures — Christ and John — are shown together in an implied landscape, often surrounded by angels and natural abundance. This subject combined the warm human appeal of childhood with theological content (the two figures whose lives were intertwined from before birth) and visual opportunity (the surrounding angels and garlands gave Snyders room for his characteristic display of natural abundance as devotional symbol). The Fogg Museum, part of Harvard Art Museums, holds major European paintings including significant Flemish Baroque works.

The sacred figures require Snyders to work in a softer, more idealised register than his naturalistic animal and food subjects. The Christ Child and John are rendered with the smooth flesh and gentle sfumato appropriate to devotional imagery — a technique influenced by his Flemish training and Italian-derived convention rather than the more robust treatment of his secular work. Angels surrounding them provide a middle register between the idealised sacred figures and any surrounding natural abundance.