Pieter Snyers, called le Saint due to his piety, was born into an affluent family in Antwerp. He studied with Alexander van Bredael in 1694, and was accepted as a master of the Brussels guild in 1705. In 1707 he joined the guild in his native city of Antwerp, where he would remain the rest of his life, aside from a brief journey to England in the 1720s, where he appears to have worked as a portrait painter (P. Sutton, op. cit.).

In addition to painting traditional flower still lives and game pieces, Snyers specialized in still lives that contain what Sutton describes as "an amateur scientist's interests" (ibid.). These paintings often include closely-observed shells and other exotic naturalia that one would ...