Still life of game and dogs

Dated 1660 and held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, this still life of game and dogs is among Boel's most compositionally ambitious category of work — the animated hunt still life where live dogs interact with dead quarry in a scene that prolongs the hunt's drama beyond the moment of killing. Dogs pressing noses to fallen game, or posed over their quarry, were common in Flemish decorative painting as assertions of the hunt's successful conclusion and as tributes to the working animals that made it possible. The Montreal museum's acquisition of this work reflects the international dispersal of Flemish Baroque hunting still lifes, which were enthusiastically collected by North American institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for their combination of technical virtuosity and decorative ambition.

Live dogs in interaction with dead game require Boel to render contrasting states of animal physicality: the dogs' taut muscular alertness against the relaxed inertness of fallen birds or mammals. His brushwork modulates accordingly — short, tensioned strokes for dog musculature and alertness, longer, flatter strokes for the yielding forms of dead game.