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Loading...In addition to fruit and flower still-lifes with cool colour harmonies, van Aelst also enjoyed painting elegant hunting weapons and dead animals placed in a dark corner by a wall for rich clients. One example is this still-life. A dead partridge is hanging by its leg from a piece of string. Its wings and feathers, which are grey with brownish patches, open up towards us at the bottom like a fan. The fly on the light-coloured feathers has an illusionist effect: disproportionately large in size, it belongs to the realistic level of the picture rather than its fictitious one, so that the viewer is given the impression that a real fly is crawling across the painting. The bird’s head has been pressed slightly towards the […]