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The Oyster Easter

(1613 to 1679 France)

Colnaghi

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Collection Cardinal Fesch until 1845; Private Collection, Germany.

‘Catalogue des Tableaux des le Nain qui ont passé dans les ventes publiques de l’année 1755 à 1853’, in Revue universelle des Arts, 14, Paris-Brussels 1861, 2nd part, p. 105ff; Galerie de Feu S.E. le cardinal Fesch, par George, peintre, Commissaire-Expert du Musée Royal du Louvre, Rome 1844, 3rd part, p. 41, no. 376-1829; Catalogue des Tableaux Composant la Galerie de Feu son Eminence le Cardinal Fesch, Rome, 1841, p.77, no. 1829 (as Antoine le Nain); G. Isarlo, ‘Les Trois LeNain et leur suite’, in La Renaissance, Paris, March 1938, no.1, numéros spéciale 30, p. 46, no. 119; Champfleury,; P. Rosenberg, Tout l’oeuvre peint des Le Nain, Paris 1993, p. 98, J17 [listed under the ‘Maitre des Jeux’ as attributed to Henri Strésor]; C. Grimm, Stilleben. Die italienischen, spanischen und französischen Meister, Stuttgart, Zürich 1995, pp. 174-175, fig. 87 [as by Henri Strésor].

This charming and beautifully painted genre painting with a still-life of oysters, dateable to the mid-seventeenth century, is by a rare French master, of German extraction, Henry Strésor, who settled in Paris in 1641 and remained there until his death in 1679. Having embraced Catholicism, Strésor became a portrait painter at the French Court, executing portraits in the 1650s and 1660s of Louis XIV, the Marquis d’Aguilar, Pierre Seguin and Monteil de Grignan, the Archbishop of Arles, some of which were engraved. During the 1640s and 1650s, on the evidence of the present picture, he also seems to have painted genre paintings in the manner of the Le Nain, which show the influence of the French caravaggistes. His daughter, Anne-Marie Renée Strésor (1651-1713) was an accomplished miniaturist who was elected to the Academie Royale in 1676 and later became a nun.

Given its close stylistic affinities to the work of the Le Nain, it is not surprising that, when the painting was included in 1844 in the auction in Rome of the famous collection of Cardinal Fesch, the Commissaire Expert du Musée Royal du Louvre ascribed the painting to Antoine Le Nain and published it with the following description:

Fresh oysters, pâté, radishes and white wine were always the ornaments of a table, the delicacies of a gourmet which made an excellent lunch; thus thinks the young gastronome who is presented to us .


The painting was sold in that auction for 115 écus (632 fr, 50 cents).

It was not until 1993, when Pierre Rosenberg published a new catalogue raisonné of works by the Le Nain brothers, that questions over the traditional attribution arose. Rosenberg included the painting in his catalogue alongside a group of works attributed by Jean-Pierre Cuzin to’Le Maitre des Jeux’ an anonymous follower of Matthieu le Nain. To this anonymous master Cuzin, in his review of the 1978 Le Nain exhibition at the Grand Palais , ascribed the Les joueurs de tric-trac (Louvre) and the Soldats jouant aux cartes (Barber Institute, Birmingham) as well as a number of other pictures showing scenes of peasants eating meals, such as Le Dejeuner (formerly Kaiser-Freidrich Museum, Magdeburg -current whereabouts unknown) and the Déjeuner Rustique (Detroit Institute of Arts), all of which he saw as characterised by clearcut volumes defined by strong lighting from the side, long shadows on the ground, vigorous execution, hands energetically built, faces strongly constructed in facets and with strongly marked folds in the draperies, qualities which Cuzin saw as untypical of the Le Nain. While some of these features can be seen in the present picture, the handling is more assured than in many of the pictures attributed by Cuzin to the Maitre des Joueurs and in 1993 Rosenberg suggested that it might be by Strésor. His attribution was confirmed by the discovery of a clear Strésor signature when the painting was cleaned and the painting was published with the full attribution to Strésor by Grimm in 1995.

Cardinal Joseph Fesch (1763-1839), who owned this picture in the early nineteenth century was the uncle of the Emperor Napoleon and one of the most remarkable art collectors of the early ninteenth century. Between about 1796 and his death in 1839 he put together a vast collection, which, acccording to his posthumous inventory, comprised nearly 16,000 works, drawn from most periods of art history. The finest pieces were displayed in Fesch’s Roman residence, the Palazzo Falconieri in the Via Giulia. The collection contained many masterpieces, including Mantegna’s Agony in the Garden (National Gallery, London) and Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time (Wallace Collection, London). Upon his death, the collection was left in part to the Institut des Etudes, Ajaccio, that he had founded (now mostly Musée Fesch, Ajaccio); most of the rest, including the present picture, was sold off at auction in Rome between 1843 and 1845.