Lot 93: JACQUES LINARD TROYES 1597 - 1645 PARIS

STILL LIFE OF A MELON, PEACHES, GRAPES AND FIGS IN BASKET RESTING ON LEDGE

measurements note
20 1/4 by 24 in.; 51.4 by 61 cm.

signed lower center I LINARD and dated lower right 1636

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Anonymous sale (Collection R.B. and various owners), Paris, Hôtel Drouot, March 29, 1993, lot 51;
Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby's, January 11, 1996, lot 144;
Where purchased by the present owner.

LITERATURE

P. Nusbaumer, Jacques Linard 1597 - 1645, Abbeville, 2006, pp. 54 - 55, cat. no. 12, reproduced, (as present location unknown).

NOTE

From shortly after his death until the beginning of the twentieth century, Linard and his unique still lifes were more or less forgotten. He was "rediscovered" in a 1911 article by Emil Waldmann dedicated to the National Gallery of Greece, Athens, which had acquired a Still Life of Fruit, signed and dated 1629; it was the first example of Linard's work to enter a public collection. This triggered further investigation about the relatively unknown early French still life artist. Charles Sterling presented two of Linard's still lifes in his groundbreaking 1934 exhibition Peintres de la réalité en France au XVII^e siècle.

Since then Linard has been more fully studied and is now considered together with Moillon, Garnier, and Stoskopff amongst the founders of French still life painting. Indeed as still life painting was being developed in the Netherlands, Linard pioneered in the genre in France. His austere, Jansenist approach was very different from the opulence of Dutch and Flemish painters, in which precious objects, fruit, flowers and other elements are composed and juxtaposed in a somewhat disorderly manner. Linard's paintings are venerations to sobriety and balance.

Linard's work is rare and only 48 fully autograph examples are extant. This painting, signed and dated 1636, is from the artist's early maturity. Only five dated pictures predate it (Nusbaumer, see Literature, notes four undated pictures which are earlier, based on stylistic grounds). Linard sometimes reused certain elements, even years later; for example, the melon in the basket in the present composition, and less closely the peaches nearby, reappears later in two other paintings, both dated 1642 ( one location unknown, and the other in the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, see Nusbaumer, op. cit., cat. Nos. 28-29).