JACQUES LINARD (TROYES 1597-1645 PARIS)
Nature morte aux fruits dans un panier en osier, avec un melon entamé
signé 'Is LINARD' (en bas, à gauche, sur l'entablement)
daté '1636' (en bas, au centre, sur l'entablement)
huile sur panneau
55 x 65 cm (21²⁄₃ x 25⁹⁄₁₆ in.)

Collection particulière, Paris, en 1974 (selon Connaissance des Arts, 1974, op. cit. infra).
Collection particulière de la région parisienne.

M. Faré, F. Faré, 'Davantage de lumières sur la vie, le talent et la notoriété de trois peintres français de fruits du temps de Louis XIII grâce aux recherches d'archives menées par Michel et Fabrice Faré', Connaissance des Arts, octobre 1974, 272, p. 89, reproduit en couleurs p. 93.
P. Nusbaumer, Jacques Linard 1597-1645. Catalogue de l'oeuvre peint, Le Pecq-sur-Seine, 2006, p. 52, n°11, reproduit en noir et blanc p. 53.
E. Coatalem, La nature morte française au XVIIe siècle. 17th-century Still-Life Painting in France, Dijon, 2014, reproduit en noir et blanc p. 249.

JACQUES LINARD (1597-1645), STILL LIFE WITH FRUIT IN A WICKER BASKET, WITH A CUT MELON, OIL ON PANEL, SIGNED AND DATED

Proudly signed and dated, this still life is an authoritative example of works of its day. It is part of the all-too rare body of work by the artist Jacques Linard (1595-1647), who died suddenly at the height of his artistic maturity, just a few years after this painting was executed.
Linard was one of the pioneers of still life painting in France. Living in the Saint-Germain district of Paris, home also to those northern painters who had come to the French capital, and those home-grown artists whose fame still resonates today (Louyse Moillon (1610-1696), François Garnier (c. 1600-before 1658), the Le Nain brothers, etc.), he was influenced by the works of these so-called ‘painters of reality’. Linard's first dated work, painted in 1627, an allegory of the five senses (Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. no. DL 1970 12) that he dedicated to Cardinal de Richelieu (1585-1642), is now held to be the first dated French still life. This major work in the history of French art was recently highlighted in an exhibition devoted to its genre. Entitled Les Choses (Musée du Louvre, Paris, October 2022-January 2023), the aim of the exhibition was to rehabilitate still life painting, which is sometimes taken with a certain haughtiness, even though its greatness was found in its very simplicity. Works by Linard were shown opposite one by Louyse Moillon (1610-1696), also from the 1630s, to which the present painting can be seen to respond. It has with the same cut melon to the right of piled up summer fruits a pale ledge (Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. no. 1982-21).

Influential for his contemporaries, Michel Faré stressed in 1974 that Linard was also influential for the artists who followed him. 'The flavour of Linard's fruit sometimes announces the sweetness of Chardin's. No doubt the models offered to the attention of the two painters are identical, and they themselves experienced, despite the distance of time, similar delight in these downy fruits: peaches always doomed to wither, last forever in the image that the artist has fixed of them' (see M. Faré, Le grand Siècle de la Nature Morte en France, Fribourg, 1974, p. 33).