Attributed to Louise Moillon,
 
French c.1610-1696-
 
The Fruit Seller;

Attributed to Louise Moillon,

French c.1610-1696-

The Fruit Seller;

oil on canvas, bears restorer's monogram and date '1976' (on the reverse of the canvas), 121 x 102 cm., 47½ x 40 in.

Provenance: Property from an important Greek shipping family.

Note: The Fruit Seller, by the esteemed French 17th-Century female artist Louise Moillon, is being offered at auction for the first time, representing an important rediscovery by the Still life Baroque master, whose oeuvre consists of around just seventy-five works.

In the present work, Moillon has depicted the female vendor standing behind a stall of fruit, in the midst of selecting a peach and several bunches of grapes for a customer, a role which the general positioning of the compositional elements prompts the viewer to embody. In a balanced composition which gives priority to the still life elements, Moillon has carefully arranged the womans produce across three pewter plates and three wicker baskets upon a table half covered with a white tablecloth, compositional features which are echoed in Moillons large painting entitled La Collation, c.1640, held at the Wideville Castle in the Île-de-France.

Dr Dominique Alsina has definitively ascribed the peaches in the present work to the hand of Moillon, and has noted the resemblances of those depicted in the left section of the central basket, particularly in their convincing texture, to those in many works by the artist. He has noted, too, that the purple plums bear similarities to Moillons Plate of Plums, dated 1632 (Musée Des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg no.1689), as well as the Moillonesque foliage recalling that in a Still life with grapes and figs (Private Collection, USA). In physiognomy, the fruit seller resembles closely the woman depicted on the right in The Fruit and Vegetable Monger of 1630, housed in the Louvre [RF1955-19], and in fact the model is very likely the same.

Moillon was one of the very few female painters in 17th-Century France whose artistic reputation has been held in consistently high regard. Daughter of the protestant artist Nicolas Moillon (1555-1619), she grew up in the St Germain des Prés district of Paris, and spent her entire long career in the French capital. She received lavish praise from her contemporaries and her talents were likened in 1646 by writer Georges de Scudéry to those of Peter van Boucle and Jacques Linard. She enjoyed a string of illustrious patronage and indeed was commissioned by both Claude de Bullion, Minister of Finance under King Louis XIII of France, and King Charles I of England who was believed to have owned no fewer than twelve of her paintings. Her pictures principally date to the 1630s, and, after her marriage to the wealthy timber merchant Etienne Girardot de Chancourt in 1640, she significantly slowed her production.

The genre of the Seller, combining a prosaic scene of the everyday with still life components, was thought to have been first treated by Flemish artist Joachim Beuckelaer (1533-1574), and indeed Moillons paintings generally exude Flemish influences, particularly in her adoption of trompe loeil elements; her usual, though here less pronounced, contrasting of warm and cool tones; and in her often austere, yet meticulous and realistic still life details. Her paintings are undoubtedly indebted to one of the earliest European practitioners of still life painting and fellow female artist Fede Galizia (c.1574-1630), and have been suggested to further reflect the influences of Netherlandish artists Jacob van Hulsdonck, Isaac Soreau, and Osias Beert.

Moillons careful rendering of compositional elements and acute attention to detail are particularly evident here in the textures and warm tonality of the fruit, as well as in her rendering of the different surfaces throughout, including the baskets, the folds of cloth, and the womans porcelain skin. She also frequently adopted the effective compositional device of stretching the table ledge beyond the viewers plane of vision, thereby enhancing the illusionism of the scene, as in the present work. The majority of her oeuvre is made up of smaller, pure still life compositions, though a number of these more ambitious compositions including both figurative (one, two, or three figures) and still life elements exist: see, for example, La marchande de fruits offered at Artcurial, Paris, 14 November 2017, lot 484; a different La marchande de fruits sold at Artcurial, Paris, 13 November 2015, lot 39; Market stall with a young woman giving a basket of grapes at Sothebys, London, 11 December 2003, lot 58; At the Market Stall (Private Collection); and the aforementioned Louvre panel.

The present work has been retouched and restored more than once. Indeed, the attractive trellis appears to have been added later, and there is evidence of certain other later areas of paint, including various outlines to several of the pieces of fruit.

We are grateful to Dr Dominique Alsina for his assistance in the cataloguing of this lot, based on first-hand inspection of the work. He notes that it would be advisable to re-examine the canvas following a careful restoration in which the various later interventions, which currently interfere with its legibility, are removed.