Lot 25: Louise Moillon (Paris 1610-1696)

Peaches in a faience bowl with grapes and figs on a stone ledge
signed 'Louyse Moillon' (lower right)
oil on panel
19 1/8 x 25 1/4 in. (48.5 x 64 cm.)

The viewer is invited to look down on this arrangement of succulent peaches filling a modest Delft bowl. A peach lies, half-eaten, on the simple shelf next to some figs and two bunches of grapes. The composition is one of controlled simplicity: a refined meditation on the bounties of nature, of exquisite quality, but not exuberant.

Moillon belongs to a school of French still-life painters, alongside Linard, Boucle and Stosskopf who all cultivated this taste for a somewhat archaic tendency towards simple realism. Perhaps their origins can be traced to Northern artists such as Jacob Hulsdonck and Osias Beert, and, perhaps in the case of Stosskopf and Moillon, a Protestant disdain for worldly show lies at the root of their strikingly pared-down compositions.

Louise Moillon was born in 1610 (ten years after Linard), the daughter of a portrait and landscape painter, Nicolas, who lived on the Pont Notre Dame in the heart of a community of protestant painters and artisans. Her father died when she was ten and her mother remarried a still-life painter, François Garnier, from whom she undoubtedly learnt her craft.

Her earliest signed works are from 1630 and it is probably to this period that this beautiful Still life with Peaches can be dated. In particular, one sees similarities between this and the Still life with Peaches in a Basket in the museum in the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, dated 1631. In 1640, Moillon married a Calvinist lumber merchant, Etienne Girardot, and seems thereafter to have abandoned her career. Her last securely dated work is from 1641. During her career, although she produced a few still-lifes with figures in the manner of Adriaen van Utrecht, Moillon specialized in small compositions on panel, usually of fruit, arranged in a bowl or basket, placed on a ledge.

This beautifully preserved painting is a canonical example of what Michel Faré called 'the absolute sincerity of (its) author. Informed by the most humble, day-to-day reality, she disdained decorative effects. She touches us by her scrupulous talent which she subordinates to the truth of the object that she sets out to depict'.