Offered by Antiquités Philippe Glédel
18th Furniture, country french furniture
An important oil on canvas depicting a young maid preparing to cut a cabbage, her gaze pensive and almost enigmatic as she looks at the viewer, painted at mid-body and enhanced by skilful chiaroscuro.
Workshop of Jean-Baptiste Santerre, first half of the 18th century.
[Seen by Éric Turquin and confirmed as such].
The Musée de Bordeaux's copy is considered by specialists to be the most faithful and successful of all. Our painting is as close to it as possible, in terms of format, quality and color palette.
Dimensions: height 93 cm x width 74 cm (stretcher size 30 F).
Condition : Untouched painting, hung on a 19th-century key frame.
Cleaned and varnished by our restorer.
Jean-Baptiste Santerre (Magny-en-Vexin 1651 - Paris 1717): history and portrait painter. The young painter first trained with François Lemaire, then apprenticed with Bon Boulogne in 1675. Interestingly, there is almost no record of his activity before 1698. Santerre was finally admitted to the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture as a history painter in 1704 with Suzanne au bain (Paris, Musée du Louvre). Living at the Louvre, he entered the official part of his career in his fifties, turning to the art of portraiture and multiplying the fantasy figures that made him a success and won him numerous commissions. His most inspired works are often described as sensual (as in the case of his Sainte Thérèse, which caused a scandal, and about which d'Argenville wrote: "The characters of the heads are so beautiful, the expression and action so vivid, that to scrupulous people this painting seems dangerous, and even ecclesiastics avoid celebrating our Holy Mysteries at the altar of this chapel". Noticed by Louis XIV, he also received strong support from the Regent towards the end of his life. As a result, several paintings entered the royal collections, including La Madeleine et Marie-Adélaïde de Savoie (Louvre), a Portrait du Régent and Le Régent et la déesse Minerve sous les traits de la comtesse de Parabère (Versailles). And while art historians agree that his talent as a draughtsman and colorist made him one of the greatest portraitists of his time, they mainly focus on his influence, as an easel painter, on French painting in the first half of the 18th century.
There's no doubt that Santerre was an inspired artist, and his paintings, far from mawkish, surprise and challenge us all the more because he was able to distance himself from academicism, transcend genres and, by reinterpreting the Flemish masters, experiment with easel painting on a variety of themes appealing to the creative imagination (departing from a more conventional realism).
In the first two decades of the eighteenth century, his female figures enjoyed great success with enlightened connoisseurs: the Mercure Galant reported that "they were snatched, as it were, from one another's hands, and fetched a considerable price". Alfred Potiquet, a leading expert on Jean-Baptiste Santerre, sums up the craze for his work in the early 18th century: "He painted fantasy heads, in which he put the most pleasing features of those for whom he was making them. This rather eccentric procedure did not diminish his clientele and increased the number of admirers of his talent".
