(Paris circa 1610–1696)
The fruit seller,
oil on canvas, 122 x 112 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private European collection;
art market, London;
where acquired by the present owner

We are grateful to Dr. Dominique Alsina for endorsing the attribution after examination of the present painting in the original following recent cleaning.

In this illusionistic composition, a fruit seller is presenting fruit, holding a plate of grapes and holding aloft a ripe peach, inviting the viewer to participate in the scene. The compositional arrangement with the fruit presented in three large baskets and the white tablecloth only half-covering the table, are recuring characteristics in Moillon’s work, including in the large painting entitled La Collation, conserved in the Château de Wideville in the Île-de-France (see D. Alsina, Louyse Moillon, La nature morte au Grand Siècle, Catalogue raisonné, Dijon 2009, p. 168, no. 42). The model of the saleswoman in the present work appears to be the same as in the canvas La marchande de fruits et de légumes, conserved in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, which is dated 1630 (inv. no. RF 1955 19; see D. Alsina, ibid., 2009, p. 115, no. 4).

Louyse Moillon was born in 1610 in Paris into a family of artists: her maternal grandfather was a goldsmith, her father a painter and art dealer, as was her stepfather François Garnier, and her brother Isaac was one of the earliest members of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Growing up in this context, Louyse quickly became one of the leading still life painters in seventeenth-century France, combining Flemish and French influences in her works. The Moillons were Calvinists and lived in the Pont of Notre Dame area, in the same neighborhood as many artists who had fled from Holland for religious reasons and had brought the tradition of still life paintings, with vegetables, fruit and flowers arranged on a tabletop, with them. Moillon always took meticulous care in the depiction of textures, indebted to the Dutch and Flemish precedent, while the elegance of her compositions is uniquely French: her style is particularly close to that of her contemporary Jacques Linard.

The majority of Moillon’s paintings were executed in the 1630s, before her marriage to the timber merchant Etienne Girardot de Chancourt (1640). In 1641, she painted a large composition with fruits and flowers with Jacques Linard and Pieter van Boeckel, but in the following years her artistic production seems to have come to a standstill. For the most part, she produced small still lifes, while more ambitious compositions including one or more figures, such as the present painting, are extremely rare. Louyse Moillon’s work was highly praised by her contemporaries. Charles I of England owned many of her paintings and the French writer Georges de Scudéry placed her name alongside Linard and van Boeckel comparing all three to Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian in 1646 (Le Cabinet de M. de Scudéry, Paris, 1646, p. 150).