Lot 46: NICOLAS-HENRY JEAURAT DE BERTRY

NICOLAS-HENRY JEAURAT DE BERTRY PARIS 1728 - 1796 KITCHEN TABLE STILL LIFE inscribed on a label on the reverse: J. Allez oil on canvas 36 1/4 by 53 1/8 in.; 92 by 135 cm.

M. and F. Faré, La Vie Silencieuse en France, La Nature Morte au XVIIe siècle, Fribourg 1976, p. 196, reproduced fig. 295.

A. Collection, Paris;
Anonymous sale, Paris, Palais d'Orsay, 7 December 1979, lot 32;
De Beistegui collection, Château de Groussay, Montfort l'Amaury;
Their sale, Paris, Sotheby's and Poulain, Le Fur, sale held at Château de Groussay, Montfort l'Amaury, 3 June 1999, lot 540;
There purchased by the present collector.

Jeaurat de Bertry was born in Paris in the generation following Jean-Baptiste Chardin and the influence of that master on his work is unmistakable, especially in the younger artist's tables de cuisine or kitchen still lifes. This painting is a particularly fine and large scale example of that genre. A pupil of his uncle Etienne Jeaurat, who was a professor at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Jeaurat de Bertry, somewhat unusually, was both nominated and accepted into the Académie on the same day, 31 January 1756. His two reception pieces were a Still Life of Kitchen Utensils and a Still Life of Military Trophies (now in the Ecole des Beaus-Arts, Paris and the Musée de Fontainebleau respectively). Only five years later, in 1761, he was named peintre de la Reine to Queen Marie Leczinska, consort of Louis XV, and set up residence in Versailles where he remained until her death in 1768. In his later career, Jeaurat de Bertry turned to portraiture and landscape painting, but it is for his considerable skill as a still life painter that he is best known today.