Snyders was born in Antwerp in 1579 and by 1593 was recorded in the studio of Pieter Bruegel the Younger, later studying with Hendrick van Balen, the same master who would go on to train the young Van Dyck^[1]. After a trip to Rome and Milan around 1608, Snyders returned to Antwerp and began the long working partnership with Rubens for which he is now best known, contributing the eagle in Rubens's Prometheus Bound among other passages of animal and still-life painting across Rubens's output^[1]. His independent work, hunting scenes, market stalls piled with venison and fish, kitchens overrun with dead game, moved beyond the static larder paintings of earlier Flemish Mannerists toward a more theatrical, dynamic staging of abundance^[2]. His patrons included Archduke Albert VII, Philip III and Philip IV of Spain, and he prospered enough to become a close neighbour of Antwerp's burgomaster, for whom he painted a Wild Boar Hunt in the 1630s^[1].

During the years he spent in Antwerp before and after his Italian sojourn, Van Dyck made a habit of painting the painters, sculptors, musicians and architects around him, often, according to one account, for reduced fees his poorer artist friends could actually afford^[3]. Among these sitters was the sculptor Andreas Colyns de Nole, and among them too was Snyders, painted both alone and in a double portrait with his wife^[3][4]. A documented single portrait of Snyders, dated 1621, survives at the Frick Collection in New York, showing the animal painter at forty-two with the finely moulded features and tapering hands one art historian has read as Van Dyck's visual pun on his sitter's professional expertise in judging good breeding, whether canine or human^[4][5]. It is this reading, of the portrait as treating Snyders himself as a kind of specimen, elegant and well bred, that gives the picture its particular wit.

The professional respect between the two men ran in both directions. Snyders and Rubens worked together for two decades until Rubens's death in 1640, and their collaborations could be close enough that a single passage of a picture, snakes twisting from a gorgon's severed head in one instance, was difficult for later scholars to assign to one hand over the other^[6]. Snyders was trusted enough within that circle to serve as one of the assessors who drew up the official inventory of Rubens's collection after his death^[6]. Van Dyck's portraits of Snyders sit inside this same web of Antwerp collaboration: a leading portraitist recording, with evident warmth, a fellow specialist whose reputation, unlike a courtier's or a cleric's, rested entirely on technical mastery of a single, unglamorous subject.