Still-Life with a Dish of Peaches and Grapes

The expression «nature morte» (the French and Italian term for «still life» translates literally as «dead nature») appears to have been coined towards the middle of the 18th century and was probably tinged with a note of haughty irony which is not found in the «silent life or calm life» of Dutch 17th century painters. In evoking «death», the term used for these paintings is absolutely unsuited to their content, which is life. In most cases they celebrate life, and it was Caravaggio with his Basket of Fruit who proved that a simple still life can be as «noble» a subject as any religious or historical scene. One has but to examine the work produced by Flemish and Dutch artists to perceive the abundant similarities with that of Louyse Moillon in her choice of subject, her depiction and her compositions. The true difference lies in her handling of texture and her rendering of the objects she paints. All artists have an individual style and a way of depicting the object observed, and attribution is difficult precisely because one has to be extremely familiar with texture and treatment in order to avoid making mistakes. Establishing the school to which a work of art belongs is relatively simple, because each school has its own way of depicting and arranging a composition, but attributing a work to an individual artist is a far more complex matter. These known or anonymous artists frequented both the Pont Notre-Dame and the fairground of Saint-Germain. We should not forget that a substantial community of Flemish painters dwelt in Paris and that their art was thus traded – not to say «copied» – by other artists. Still lifes were one of the specialities of painters in the schools of northern Europe, and their treatment of fruit and vegetables shows similarities. The artist arranges a variety of different items on a horizontal surface (a wooden table, or occasionally a stone ledge) to create a balanced composition (a basket or some other vessel containing various fruits and vegetables, with overflowing foliage and different fruits and vegetables scattered on the table in the foreground). This confusion among schools and artists is triggered basically by texture rather than by composition. If we study the texture carefully, we will see that it differs from the texture of painters from the northern European and other schools.

It is interesting to take a fresh look at the progress of the artist’s corpus of works. In 1900, Louis Gonse indicated nine paintings inventoried (four in the Musée de Toulouse, four in the Musée de Grenoble and one in the Paul Mantz collection, dated 1631)¹ In 1940, Ernest Coyecque published the inventory draughted on the death of Louyse Moillon’s mother, which lists fourteen still lifes². In 1956, Jacques Wilhelm pointed to nineteen pictures, two of which contained figures. In 1962 and 1974, Michel and Fabrice Faré mentioned forty-two paintings, some of them questionable and four of which contained figures. And in 1976, Ann Sutherland Harris and Nochlin listed over thirty paintings, nineteen of which were signed and dated³.

At the time of writing, the corpus includes 180 recognised works by the artist, 80 of which are signed or otherwise. The 100 works (attributed and rejected) which do not belong to the corpus produced by the artist were essentially classified on the basis of recognised stylistic criteria belonging to one or the other school or, wherever possible, to one or the other artist. Our criteria meet the criteria assigned to the various schools, whether in terms of depiction, composition, treatment or style. The recognised criteria of the French school, for example, were strongly inspired by the Flemish and Dutch painters because there was an enormous amount of influence due to the numerous confraternities that had settled in Paris, yet the school sought to distinguish itself through a handling of texture proper to each artist. It has occasionally proven impossible for us to reach a firm conclusion in connection with a number of paintings precisely on account of the artistic criteria, which leave room for doubt even if the texture and handling have been studied in great detail. In such cases, we have opted for the term «attributed to».

What we call «subjective» criteria are based on both intuitive and artistic familiarity with a painter’s work, which has a major impact on the choice of works that one adds to an artist’s corpus. The subjects favoured by Louyse were fruit, vegetables, and occasional figures built into her still lifes. It also seems likely that she produced floral compositions, as in the painting attributed to her entitled La Bouquetière (The Flower Girl), in which a female figure in a three-quarter pose proffers her flowers to the observer. After all, Georges de Scudéry⁴ linked her to Jacques Linard and Pieter van Boucle in his imaginary museum in 1646: A large picture of fruit and flowers made by Vanboucle, Linard and Louyse Moillon: He who deceived the birds, had he lived in our century, would have seen his pictures wiped clean by three hands who deceive mankind. No element of comparison allows us to state that Louyse Moillon was a female painter of flowers, even if Georges de Scudéry does suggest it or idealises her, and even if we do find in the sale catalogue of the Cabinet of M. Morel⁵: Four pictures of flowers and fruit; two by Loyer Moillon, and two copies of Baptifte. A painting depicting a basket of flowers, by the same. Height 7 and a half inches, width 10 and a half inches.

Classification of the artist’s work in chronological order rests on her dated works and on the stylistic and artistic criteria of each painting. We have endeavoured to be consistent in both our classification and our dating.

An examination of the stylistic features of the artist’s work shows that she painted them in an extremely austere manner, an approach likely to reflect both her thoroughly Jansenist stringency, deeply inspired by Flemish and Dutch compositions, and a fashion. Where her palette is concerned, black and white are distinct colours and Protestantism adopted a colour code built exclusively around a black-grey-white axis, shunning excessively vibrant or strong colours. The colours used in the depiction of fruit are colours that refuse to become vibrant and that were probably enforced by the stringency of Protestantism, the religion to which the artist subscribed and whose codes were strictly Lutheran. Protestant painters’ palettes⁶ were not those of their Catholic counterparts; in the 16th and 17th centuries, they depended on the stance adopted by the reformers in connection with artistic creativity and aesthetic sensibility. Calvin made a large number of remarks and issued numerous precepts where art and colour are concerned. The artist must shun artificial subjects that encourage intrigue or lasciviousness, he must seek harmony of form and colour, he must draw inspiration from creation and depict what he sees, honouring God by portraying creation. According to Calvin, the most beautiful colours are those we find in nature, and it is easy to see these precepts reflected in Louyse Moillon’s work. One is almost tempted to suggest that there may well be such a thing as a Protestant palette…

If we examine the work of Louyse Moillon, François Garnier and Pierre Dupuis (1610–82), their colour range is sober, with a specific mood imparted by dominant and recurring shades. In their still lifes, we encounter an overall sobriety, with extensive use of blacks and other dark hues, the artists playing with tones and shunning anything that might shock the eye by altering the painting’s colour scheme with clashing shades. Protestant painters appear not to hold a monopoly on this austere palette, however, because we encounter it again in the work of Philippe de Champaigne, a Catholic painter whose palette became more austere and darker the closer he drew to Port-Royal, before converting to Jansenism outright in 1646.

What the observer looks at is a simple wooden panel whose cut edges can often be made out, the surface slightly inclined towards him, in what is nonetheless a balanced and constant composition that relies for its dynamic on the foliage of the vegetables depicted.

The vessels containing the fruit are china cups, bowls, dishes or vases from the Ming period – late 16th/early 17th century –, plates or dishes decorated with gadroons in white faïence probably from Nevers and 17th century in date, pewter plates and pitchers, and wickerwork baskets with or without handles of different shapes and woven in different patterns. The cups, bowls, dishes and plates occasionally rest on oblong boxes of wood chips, seen from a bird’s eye view. The background is neutral and bunches of grapes or vine leaves impart a certain dynamism to the composition, stacked in skilful interlaced patterns, slightly off centre compared to the main subject. Louyse frequently offsets the sophistication of the dish with a rustic basket in an effort to ennoble her composition, arranging the whole with considerable skill.

The composition is organised in a triangular geometrical figure with balanced, even distribution. When the work is signed, the signature is often placed bottom right on the cut edge of the table. This composition is lit by light coming from the left and only the elements making up the composition are lit, thus leaving the background in shadow to create an air of mystery.

She reproduces the same pattern in her less austere compositions, though they continue to be dominated by the main element, namely a still life of fruit or fruit and vegetables.

Where her compositions that include a figure are concerned, her aim was to lend them the «descriptive, anecdotal» air of a market stall or a laid table, as in the large compositions of her contemporaries, Flemish painter Frans Snyders (Antwerp, 1579-1657) or the German artist Floris van Schooten (1590-1655). Dutch painter Pieter Aertsen (1508-1575) is reputed to have been the inventor of still lifes and genre scenes in northern Europe, an observer of daily life in this area, through having painted numerous scenes of markets or well-stocked kitchens. He showed a deep interest in everyday life and humdrum objects, helping to introduce these two new themes, genre scenes and still lifes, by initially introducing them as an additional element in religious scenes. He exalted the working-class woman by informing her with the majesty of a goddess, yet without depriving her of her plebeian character. He turned the still life into a noble arrangement of beautiful objects while simply painting cuts of meat or vegetables. With Aertsen, lower-class life acceded to the «nobility», and he was followed in this by his nephew and pupil Joachim Beuckelaer (c. 1530 – c. 1573) and by Frans Snyders. These artists were to pave the way for the great painters of the 17th century, and Louyse Moillon probably had the opportunity to observe their work at first hand in the workshops and lodgings on the Pont Notre-Dame or in the fairground of Saint-Germain.

Unlike these masters, however, Louyse never really built her figures into her compositions. Still life was her main subject and she seems to have given of her best in terms of technique when endeavouring to exalt fruit and vegetables. While her vegetables are skilfully depicted, her figures appear stiff and clumsily portrayed, as in The Fruit and Vegetable Costermonger in the Louvre or The Fruit and Vegetable Costermonger in a private collection.

If we consult the inventory draughted on the death of François Garnier’s second wife, Denise Dupont⁷, we find out from the list of pictures that two are the product of a joint effort between Garnier, who painted the figures, and Louyse Moillon, who painted the fruit⁸. Given the close family ties and the bond of affection that probably existed between them, it is absolutely plausible that they should have worked together on a painting, especially as we have often wondered whether it was Louyse who painted the figures or whether they were, in fact, by some other hand. The corpus of her paintings includes six pictures depicting a still life with figures. We have tried to find artistic links in such features as the texture, the overall handling or the depiction of these figures, but to no avail, and the figures are clumsily painted on the whole.

Claude de Bullion employed his talents to produce a number of pictures, including a painting that has come down to us entitled La Collation, built into the mantelpiece in the salle du poisle in the Château de Wideville. Two of the figures in the painting, a lady of some standing and a page pouring her a drink, are shown in profile, yet they are rendered in a more realistic fashion and their treatment is more elaborate. In this work for the Château de Wideville, where Simon Vouet (1590-1649) also worked, another more skilled hand is likely to have intervened – why not Simon Vouet himself, who signed the contract for decorating the rooms of the château with King Louis XIII’s Superintendent of Finances Claude de Bullion? If Louyse Moillon painted still lifes superbly, then she may have painted the figures, but given that figures were not her speciality, she may have painted them with a certain degree of clumsiness. Other paintings are mentioned in the inventory of Claude de Bullion’s property draughted after his death.

The inventory specifically names the artist – three by Louyse Moillon and two others –, but unfortunately we do not know what has become of these works. No contract has been discovered between Claude de Bullion and Louyse Moillon, which suggests that they may have been commissioned by Simon Vouet in his capacity as a go-between.

The figures may also have been painted by other artists specializing in them. It is just possible to identify in them the style of the Beaubrun brothers, who excelled in portraiture and in the depiction of figures.

If we compare the six pictures, whether they are signed, dated or merely attributed to the artist, we can detect no similarity, even upon meticulous inspection, in the execution of the figures used to depict daily life; unlike the still lifes, which appears to confirm her cooperation with one or more artists rather than her having painted the figures herself. While this is, of course, guesswork, it is nonetheless extremely plausible.

There is a «Moillon» manner, but it is found solely in the production of still lifes, which she paints with intense realism, technical mastery and an aura of «mystery» imparted by her treatment and her austerity.

The discovery of other work dated before 1629 would flesh out the notion of her precociousness. We can already detect her exceptional talent in 1629, when she was only nineteen years old. By then, her father-in-law, François Garnier, was stipulating special terms for the work of his still very young daughter-in-law⁹.

Louyse swam against the tide in many respects by the standards of her day. She married at thirty, when girls were customarily wed by the age of twenty-six or twenty-seven¹⁰ given that people died young at the time (although Louyse was ‘very old’ by the time she died at eighty-six).

Loyal as she was to her painting technique and her talent, it is impossible for her marriage¹¹to have contributed to the cessation of her output, even if a large part of her work is dated up to 1641, particularly in consideration of her exceptional mastery of technique.

In our view, her marriage marked a turning point in her career, because her technique and her handling of texture evolved at that date. Louyse Moillon built up a technical maturity that developed from her youthful work right through to her mature paintings.

In her early period, from 1629 to 1641, she reproduced a basket of apricots several times over before adding it to lusher, less austere compositions. It must have been a subject that she liked, but possibly also a subject that was popular with her clients in view of her excellent treatment of it and of its importance as a symbol of abundance.

But should we really be looking for the kind of symbolism in Louyse Moillon’s depiction of fruit and vegetables that we find in the work of her Flemish and Dutch contemporaries? If we list the various fruit and vegetables, we find a wicker basket laden with fruit, with apricots; a salad bowl or a bowl of strawberries, plums or figs (pleasure and original sin); apples, pomegranates (chastity, fertility, unfulfilled desire), citrus fruit, bitter oranges, pumpkins, water melons (fertility and a symbol of the church – fruit with many seeds = numerous descendants), a mulberry tree, peaches, a pear tree, apples and red or white grapes, vines (an image of knowledge and immortality); fruit either whole or cut in half, fruit peel resting on the table or hanging over the edge, which could symbolize fecundity, fertility, abundance, the pleasure of tasting and redemption; the fly occasionally resting at the front of the composition alluded, like fruit peel, to our ceaseless hankering and to the precarious nature of things.

This list of fruit and vegetables basically symbolizing fertility may be interpreted as a subconscious hankering after motherhood on the artist’s part, if we remember that she married late and died without children, but we do not believe that the fruit and vegetables she painted carry any message. They are simply depictions of the kind of fruit and vegetables that the mistress of the house would inspect on a market stall or a laid table. They embody abundance and we should see in them, as in those of her contemporary Jacques Linard, an ordered arrangement in which the fruit represent taste; her portrayal urges us simply to contemplate them, rather than getting bogged down in some complex symbolic interpretation. Her simplicity and discretion spawn a poetic sentiment. Where her vegetables are concerned, several of them changed their image, because while they had hitherto been the fare of the common folk, they suddenly became worthy of people of standing. I am referring to the cabbages, asparagus, artichokes, peas, cucumbers, turnips and melons that we discover in pride of place on well-stocked tables.

Certain fruit, such as apricots, plums, nectarines and peaches, appear to have been fashionable in the 17th century, and these are the fruit that Louyse loved depicting. Her early work, in which each fruit is handled individually, is at odds with her mature work, in which the fruit are handled as a group. The background partakes of the picture’s subject and is one with that subject. In her early work, contrast is important, and the background is there to serve that purpose, but purely as part of the setting. In her mature years, on the other hand, the silhouette of each individual fruit is less marked, merging with the background with greater harmony, and the texture of the fruit has an impact on her manner. The drop of water delicately added to some of her work continues to be very sharply defined. Texture holds pride of place in her mature work, to the detriment of the form that played such an important role in her early paintings, possibly due to her draughtsmanship. We can detect more texture in her mature work, but in all her work her choice of support has an impact on texture and on the way it is rendered.

Like her contemporaries, Louyse Moillon preferred to paint on wood and on oakwood panels: only twenty-four of her pictures are on canvas, while fifty-six are on (mostly oak) wood panels.

The format most frequently used by the artist is what we might call medium, i.e. some 0.354 mt. in height and 0.525 mt. in width – basically the kind of easel painting that did not look out of place in a wunderkammer or a bourgeois dining room. Out of a total of eighty works, seventeen are large, fifty-four are medium and only nine are small.

The Fundação’s Still Life with a Dish of Peaches and Grapes is a new picture that sits comfortably in the context of Louyse Moillon’s youthful output.

On a small oakwood panel, in a balanced composition, the artist here has produced a still life of fruit with peaches and grapes elegantly arranged, some in a pewter plate, others on either side of that plate, the whole on a wooden table with foliage designed to impart a certain dynamism to the composition.

It is unquestionably a subject of which the artist was particularly fond, given that several of her compositions depict the same subject matter. The Still Life with a Dish of Peaches Resting on a Box of Wood Chips signed Louyse Moillon and dated 1634¹² (fig. 1), formerly in the Robert Lebel collection, virtually replicates the same arrangement and main subject matter, a still life with peaches. As indeed does the Bowl of Peaches signed Louyse Moillon and dated 1629¹³ (fig. 2), formerly in the Salavin collection.

Louyse tailored her work to her clients’ requirements, and she appears to have reproduced subjects to their liking while varying the content of her paintings.

The lighting from the left imbues the work with a unique atmosphere, inviting meditation. Yet in our view, we should not read any specific symbolic significance into her depiction of the peaches or grapes, into the half-peach painted in the foreground or into the marvellously transparent drop of water.

The painting is neither dated nor signed, yet we can recognise the style and manner of this French 17th century female artist who loved the still life, a genre unjustly still considered minor.

She was the only one able to breathe new life into these still lifes depicting fruit thanks to her exceptionally velvety handling of texture, sometimes a clue confirming a work’s autograph nature.

The artist appears to have surpassed her master François Garnier (fig. 3) in this fine still life (fig. 4)¹⁴ thanks to her unique technique and treatment, never equalled by her male peers, artists such as Jacques Linard (1597-1645) or Pierre Dupuis (1610-1682).