THE rebuke 'Your eyes were bigger than your stomach' will have been shamingly obvious to all of us at some point. I recently experienced it more or less in reverse. My eyes initially reacted to Le panier des fraises des bois by Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) with distaste, which I then realised was triggered by my stomach–I can no longer eat strawberries, even wild ones, as they are a gout trigger. When I looked at the 15in by 19in still life properly, my aesthetic assessment was quite different.
Unlike many Dutch 17thcentury still lifes (still even, silent lives), 18th-century French natures mortes of this kind do not tell stories or point to morals, the intention is to provoke an emotional response to beauty and harmony. In this one, exhibited in 1761, the pyramid of fruit, however beautifully painted, would probably not do the job without the accompanying glass, carnations, cherries, and peach, which make the composition a triangle within a pentagon, to greater harmonious effect. As it is, this simple-seeming painting could happily be contemplated for hours, even by the gouty.
Last November, Christie's Paris took a record €7.11 million for a Chardin genre painting of a maid filling a bucket from a water cistern; that record was comprehensively trashed by the €24,381,000 (820.6 million) made by Le panier des fraises des a bois with Artcurial and the Turquin dealership on March 24. It came from the descendants of François Marcille (1790–1856), who had built up a massive collection of 18th-century paintings, including 40 Bouchers, 30 Chardin's, and 25 Fragonards, many bought in flea markets as 18thcentury art was still deeply unfashionable after the Revolution. It would be fascinating to know what he paid for this one.
Esta historia es de la edición April 20, 2022 de Country Life UK.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición April 20, 2022 de Country Life UK.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
