Vegetarian students Cambridge want to have old master removed

The painting, from the studio of Frans Snyders, shows a poulterer in the midst of dead birds, like a swan and a pheasant. There’s also a dead deer on display. It’s a beautiful, but gruesome scene.

The painting was hung in a dining room, but the university has since removed it, reports British newspaper The Telegraph. Some students lost their appetites at seeing it.

The painting will be moved to the university museum, where it’ll be part of an exhibition about food between 1500 and 1800. The fact that the painting has now been removed, is exemplary for the theme, according to the curators: the moral and political choices surrounding food. The debate about vegetarianism, for instance, was already alive in the sixteenth century.

This seventeenth-century painting, by the way, was a copy by an unknown painter. The original can be found in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.