The Poulterer's Shop

Snyders's Poulterer's Shop, held at the National Museum Cardiff, presents a commercial space specialised in dressed and live poultry — a subject that allowed the painter to display his knowledge of domestic birds alongside the commercial energy of the Antwerp market. The poulterer's shop was distinct from the broader market or game stall: it dealt in chickens, geese, ducks, turkeys, and other farm-bred birds rather than wild game, and its clientele was the urban middle class rather than aristocratic households. This subject was therefore a democratisation of Snyders's more typical luxury game imagery. The Cardiff museum holds important Flemish and Dutch works within the national Welsh collection. Dead poultry hanging by their feet, live birds in baskets or cages, and the commercial figure of a vendor or customer create the narrative framework. Snyders's ability to differentiate the plumage of domestic breeds — the specific feather patterns of a Dorking chicken versus a goose versus a turkey — was essential to making such compositions convincing.

The poultry subjects require differentiated brushwork: the smooth grey-white of a goose's feathers, the speckled brown of a hen's plumage, the iridescent green-black of a drake's head. Dead birds hanging vertically create strong parallel vertical rhythms across the composition. Snyders models the bodies of hanging birds through attentive observation of how feathers lie when the body is inverted by gravity.