École française du XVIIIème siècle, Atelier de Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer. Nature morte au bouquet de fleurs dans un vase antique,

École française  du XVIIIème siècle, Atelier de Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer. Nature morte au bouquet de fleurs dans un vase antique, vase en porcelaine de chine et pot à huile.

Toile. 118 x 93 cm. Restaurations. Estimation : 15 000 / 20 000 €

Note :  Notre tableau peut être rapproché du Vase de fleurs et fruits dans un paysage qui était dans la collection royale d'Angleterre (toile, 127 x 167,5 cm, signé ; voir M. Faré, Le grand siècle de la nature morte en France, le XVIIe siècle, Paris, 1974, p. 314).

Nous remercions Claudia Salvi pour son aide dans la description de ce tableau.

Vente du Mercredi 17 juin 2009. Tableaux, Bijoux, Argenterie, Extrème Orient, Mobilier & Objets d'Art. Kapandji Morhange - Paris

Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer (12 January 1636 — 20 February 1699) was a Franco-Flemish painter who specialised in flower pieces. He was attached to the Gobelins tapestry workshops and the Beauvais tapestry workshops, too, where he produced cartoons of fruit and flowers for the tapestry-weavers, and at Beauvais was one of three painters who collaborated to produce cartoons for the suite The Emperor of China.

He was born at Lille, but was in Paris by 1650, where he was documented working on the decors of the Hôtel Lambert. He was taken up by Charles Le Brun for decorative painting at the Château de Marly and at the Grand Dauphin's residence, the Château de Meudon. He was received at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1665 with a piece of the genre that he made his specialty, a still life of flowers and fruit combined with objets d'art. His only appearance at the Paris salon was in 1673, when four paintings of flowers were exhibited by "M. Baptiste".

In 1690 he left France for England, to work on painting decorations for Montagu House, Bloomsbury, London, where he produced over fifty panels of fruit and flowers for overmantels and overdoors, some of which have survived at Boughton House, Northamptonshire  He died in London in 1699. His eldest son, Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer le Jeune, was a painter of battle scenes.

His suites of engravings, most notably Le Livre de toutes sortes de fleurs d'après nature show flowers with botanical accuracy and served decorative designers for decades. Monnoyer's engravings of flower pieces were being used by tapestry makers, such as at the Soho tapestry works in London, long after his death.  In the twentieth century the poet Wallace Stevens invoked Monnoyer's title Livre de toutes sortes de fleurs d'après nature in his philosophical poem "Esthéthique du Mal", whose centrality to Stevens' work was stressed by Harold Bloom: for Stevens "all sorts of flowers" epitomized the anodyne and sentimental poem, attempting to address and assuage "all sorts of misfortune". (wikipedia)