Lot 25. Pierre Dupuis (Montfort-l'Amaury 1610 - 1682 Paris), Still Life of Peaches in a Wicker Basket atop a Blue Tablecloth, oil on canvas; canvas: 49.8 by 58.7 cm. framed: 63.5 by 73.7 cm. Estimate 60,000 - 80,000 USD. Lot Sold 133,350 USD. © Sotheby's 2024

Provenance: With Galerie d'Art du Bristol, Paris;
Francine De Camaret Meyer (1924-2001), New York;
By whose estate sold ("Property from the Collection of the Late Francine Meyer"), New York, Christie's, 7 June 2002, lot 48;
With Galerie Éric Coatalem, Paris;
From whom acquired by the present collector, 2005.

Note: The French painter Pierre Dupuis executed this harmonious still life circa 1640, early in his career. The technical dexterity, balanced composition, and subtle color palette exemplify Dupuis’s pivotal role in the development of French still-life painting in the seventeenth century. These same characteristics led Dupuis’s contemporary, the royal historiographer and early art theorist André Félibien, to hail the artist as one of the most significant painters of the modern French school.

Dupuis sets the still life against a dark background and illuminates the scene with a soft light shining from the left. A swathe of gold-trimmed sateen fabric covers the table, atop which sits a wicker basket containing fresh peaches.¹ The creased tablecloth adds a decorative, almost spontaneous, element to the symmetrical composition, the geometric structure of which is underscored by the basket’s vertical latticework.

Dupuis renders the different textures of the still life’s varied objects with dexterity. The cool blue and white tones of the lustrous cloth adeptly play against the warm yellows, oranges, and purples of the fuzzy peaches. The lush assortment of stone fruits conveys a sense of plentitude; some are still attached to their sprigs, suggesting they are freshly picked and perfectly ripe. Yet, in a subtle allusion to the Dutch vanitas tradition, the leaves are already beginning to turn and wither slightly, as if to warn that the prime of life is fleeting and quickly passes. The frank illusionism with which Dupuis depicts the peaches also recalls the Plinian tale of Parrhasius and Zeuxius, two Greek painters competing for supremacy in the realm of trompe l’oeil painting.² While Parrhasius depicted grapes so realistic that a bird alit on his painting and attempted to eat one, Zeuxius added a fictive curtain on the same work that tricked Parrhasius into attempting to remove it.

Born in 1610 in Montfort-l’Amaury, Dupuis (fig. 1) spent the early years of his career in Paris, where he absorbed the aesthetic of the preceding generation of still-life painters. These artists, including Pieter van Boucle and Jean-Picart (in the area of Saint-Germain-des-Prés) and Louise Mouillon and Jacques Linard (in the area by the Pont Notre-Dame), exemplified an austere and sober still-life tradition that flourished under Louis XIII. Dupuis spent much of the 1630s in Italy, returning to Avignon by 1640, when he married Anne de La Pierre.³ By the 1640s, Dupuis began incorporating more ornamental passages in his works, clear predecessors of the flamboyant, almost theatrical, character of the paintings of the second school of Fontainebleau artists who flourished under Louis XIV and included Alexandre-François Desportes, Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer, Pierre Nicolas Huillot, and Meiffren Conte.

Fig. 1 Antoine Masson, After Nicolas Mignard, Pierre Dupuis, engraving, 1663.

Although still in his thirties, Dupuis enjoyed considerable success during the 1640s, when he painted the present work. On 13 April 1646, for instance, he was named Painter Ordinary of the King’s stables by Henri de Lorraine (1601-66), Count of Harancourt, Armagnac, and Brionne and Grand Squire of France, who became the artist’s protector.⁴ Dupuis’s career continued to thrive, and in 1663 he became a member of the Académie Royale de Peinture.⁵ By the eighteenth century, his work had entered the collections of Archduke Léopold-Guillaume, Marchese Vincenzo Nunez, and Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili.⁶

The present painting will be included in Eric Coatalem's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's oeuvre.

¹ The same wicker basket appears in Dupuis’s Still Life of Plums in the Musée Jeanne d'Aboville, La Fère. Eric Coatalem notes that Dupuis included such sateen or brocade tablecloths only on rare occasions. E. Coatalem, “Un peintre de natures mortes: Pierre Dupuis ou l’épanouissement d’un genre,” in L’Estampille, l’objet d’art (April 1999), p. 55. A slightly larger work with a nearly identical arrangement of peaches set on a brocaded tablecloth was exhibited in 1956 at Galerie Heim, Paris.

² Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 35.

³ Following the death of Dupuis’s first wife in 1651, he married Jeanne Rebours in 1663.

⁴ The appointment, consented to by Anne of Austria, came with an annual stipend of 100 livres.

⁵ His grand reception piece, Still Life with Plums, Pomegranates, and a Vase of Lilies, measures 88.9 by 115.9 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art, Promised Gift of Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley, inv. no. 11.2020.

⁶ Two still lifes appear in Marchese Vincenzo Nunez’s inventory of 10 May 1740; four still lifes appear in Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili’s inventory of 22 February 1725.

Sotheby's. A Scholar Collects, New York, 31 January 2024