Trader in Game

This 1561 panel of a trader in game, now in the Pyotr Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky collection, depicts a vendor displaying dead game birds — ducks, pheasants, rabbits — the luxury produce of the hunt that occupied a distinct and prestigious niche in the Antwerp market hierarchy. Game was more expensive and more socially elevated than butcher's meat, associated with aristocratic hunting culture that provided the surplus for urban sale. Pieter Aertsen treats the trader and his hanging birds with the full compositional gravity he gave to vegetable sellers and kitchen workers, but the subject implicitly bridges the aristocratic hunting world and the commercial market world. The Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky collection, assembled by the nineteenth-century Russian geographer, was a major holding of Flemish cabinet and genre pictures.

Panel support allows precise rendering of the game birds' varied plumage — duck feathers, pheasant coloration, rabbit fur — through differentiated brushwork appropriate to each species. The hanging arrangement of the game follows a tradition of display that also governed the decorative hanging game pieces in Flemish still-life painting. The trader figure is handled with Aertsen's confident, broad figure technique.