The Snyders Triptych

The Snyders Triptych of 1659, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, takes its name from Jan Boeckhorst's connection to the family of Frans Snyders, the celebrated Flemish painter of animals and hunting scenes who had been a close collaborator of Rubens. Boeckhorst himself had worked in the Rubens workshop milieu, and a commemorative or memorial triptych connected to the Snyders family would have been a deeply personal commission as well as a devotional object. The triptych format — a central panel with two wings, often including portraits of the donors on the wing panels — was the most formal and prestigious mode of Flemish devotional painting, with roots in fifteenth-century Flemish altarpiece tradition. By 1659 the format was somewhat old-fashioned but retained its prestige for significant commemorative commissions. LACMA's collection of Flemish painting from the Rubens circle makes this work an important part of their representation of seventeenth-century Antwerp's artistic culture.

The triptych format imposes a tripartite compositional structure with a hierarchically dominant central panel flanked by wings that must be visually subordinate while maintaining thematic and tonal coherence with the centre. Boeckhorst coordinates colour and light across all three panels to ensure the work reads as a unified whole when open. The commemorative function requires dignified but individualised donor portraits on the wings, painted with the same Rubensian warm modelling that distinguishes the devotional figures of the central panel.