Lot 26. Alexandre-François Desportes (Champigneulle 1661 - 1743 Paris), Still Life of the Remnants of a Meal with a Lunging Cat, indistinctly signed and dated lower left: Desportes / 17[..], oil on canvas ; canvas: 74.0 by 92.4 cm, framed: 99.7 by 118.7 cm. Estimate 200,000 - 300,000 USD. Lot Sold 254,000 USD. © Sotheby's 2024

Provenance: Perhaps François Abraham Mouchard (1712-1782), Paris;
Perhaps his posthumous sale, Paris, Pierre Vallet and François Joullain, 6 December 1782, lot 2;1
Private collection, Paris;
Art market, Paris;
With Etienne Bréton, Saint Honoré Art Consulting, Paris;
From whom acquired by the present collector, 2008.

Literature: G. de Lastic and P. Jacky, Desportes, Catalogue Raisonné, Saint-Rémy-en-L'Eau 2010, vol. II, p. 178, cat. no. P 662bis.

Note: In early eighteenth-century France, domesticated animals—cats, dogs, bird, and even monkeys—sometimes featured in still lifes as a means of introducing anecdotal narrative into otherwise static representations of utensils, serving vessels, and vittles. The theme had been imported to France by mid-seventeenth-century Flemish painters such as Pieter Claesz., who trained in the studio of Frans Snyders and eventually worked in Paris. French animaliers and still-life painters of the following generation perpetuated this approach. Chief among them was Alexandre François Desportes (fig. 1), an apprentice of the Flemish painter Nicasius Bernaerts¹. Rather than vehicles for conveying cryptic moral or religious messages, Desportes’s still lifes were expressions of sheer artistic delight in depicting the beauty of nature’s bounty, rendering a wide variety of textures and surfaces, and experimenting with tonal and chromatic juxtapositions.

Fig. 1. Alexandre-François Desportes (1661 - 1743), Self-portrait of the artist as a hunter. Oil on canvas, Paris, Musée du Louvre, Inv. n°. 3899.

In this sensitively executed gastronomic still life, Desportes portrays an inquisitive tiger-striped cat on the prowl. The mischievous animal climbs onto a table laden with the remnants of a delectable meal. Perched on the seat of a high-backed Louis XIV chair at left, the feline stealthily extends a furry paw toward a slice of cured ham on a silver dish. An assortment of finely-wrought silver objects, among them a round stand supporting a crystal glass and two small carafes containing red and white wine, are arrayed on a white linen cloth.² Among the table’s sweet and savory edibles are a tiger melon, a mound of luscious peaches (one with a leafy branch still attached), a cluster of French breakfast radishes with white root ends, and a sliced demi baguette. A carved ham, with its rind covered in flecks of crushed pepper or other spices, sits prominently on a varnished stool in the foreground.

This visual and epicurean feast recalls seventeenth-century Dutch banquet still lifes, particularly those of the Willem Claesz. Heda and his son Gerrit Willemsz. Heda. Rich chiaroscuro effects, absent from the silvery, pearlescent palette that characterize many Heda still lifes, distinguish Desportes’s composition. Indeed, the warm and mellow chromatic scheme, a seeming affirmation of the primacy of color over line, reflects the Poussinist-Roubenist debate then raging among painters and art theorists alike.

Desportes sometimes paired pre-Lenten still lifes, emphasizing the consumption of meat (so-called “déjeuner gras”) with still lifes of Lenten meals (so-called “déjeuner maigre”) of fish, oysters, and cheese. He painted the first such pair in 1704 and displayed them that year at the Salon.³ The painter included and reconstituted many of the same elements in his many explorations of this sub-genre; his Still Life with Cat (fig. 2) in Munich is especially analogous to the present painting.⁴ A prolific painter, Desportes maintained a collection of drawings and oil sketches that facilitated his artistic production. The cat here, for instance, derives from a chalk study at the Musée du Louvre (fig. 3); the ham and melon derive from a study at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans.⁵

Fig. 2. Alexandre François Desportes, Still life with cat, oil on canvas. Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Staatsgalerie Im Neuen Schloss Schleissheim, Inv. no. 1323.

Fig. 3 Alexandre François Desportes, A cat on the prowl, Black, red, anf grey chalk on paper. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Inv. n°. RF 14980.