Lot 60: Madeleine de Boulogne (Paris 1648-1710)

Pieces of parade armour, a plumed helmet, a pistol in a case, a gilt ewer, a silver perfume burner, a jewellery box, a trumpet and a flag on a cassone draped with a brocade cloth, with a parrot, a renaissance pillar clock on a pedestal and a drum and a mace on a stone floor oil on canvas 51 3/8 x 72 in. (130.5 x 182.9 cm.) PROVENANCE with Didier Aaron, Paris, from whom purchased for FFr500,000 on 24 February 1988 by Rudolf Nureyev; his (+) sale Christie's, New York, 13 January 1995, lot 121 (sold $134,500). NOTES Madeleine de Boulogne was the daughter of Louis de Bolougne I, and came from a large family of artists which also included her brothers Bon de Boulogne and Louis the younger. Her recorded work is confined to sumptuous still lifes such as the present lot, displaying objects, books, armour and symbols denoting the intellectual as well as the physical emblems of life. Always influenced by her tutor, Andr‚ Rivet, the Professor of Theology from the University of Leiden, she worked in the mainstream of court tradition under King Louis XIV. In 1669 she submitted works to the Acad‚mie Royale de Peinture in Paris, and in 1673 she is again recorded as exhibiting six works, all depicting trophies of war, that she had painted as part of a scheme of eight pictures for the Apartment of the King at Versailles. She undertook another royal commission for the antichamber of the Grand Apartments of the King at the Tuileries.