Still life with quetches by Abraham de Lust (active circa 1650)

We know very little about the life of Abraham DE LUST, probably of Flemish origin. He is mentioned in Leeuwarden in 1659. Contemporary historiography assumes that he subsequently moved to Germany. His identity is most likely that of the Flemish painter Lusse, who worked in Paris around 1650 as a painter of animals and flowers. In 1656, a painter named de Lust, possibly the same Abraham, was also in Lyon. After his return to France and before his stay in Leeuwarden, it would appear that Abraham DE LUST was active in Amsterdam.
In a style reminiscent of Gothic lettering, the painter signed “a.d. lust”, a homogeneous group of still lifes and flower paintings that allow us to link certain unsigned paintings to him with certainty.

DESCRIPTION AND STILISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE PAINTING

Quetsches are placed on a stone cornice decorated with motifs of oves, stings and spindle whorls.
They occupy a line that diligently follows the course of the overhang to the edge of the canvas, then curls to form a small mound of fruit. This is topped by sprigs and leaves, so that two-thirds of the canvas is taken up by this simple arrangement of fruit, to which the sculpted Renaissance frieze lends a certain gravity.
On closer inspection, however, the painter thwarts the strong frieze effect of this composition, which is doubly drawn by the cornice and the arrangement of fruit through one of the plums.
This is positioned at the left-hand corner of the cornice, so that its tiny protrusion, emphasized by the down of its shadow, hollows out the frank brilliance of the plane on which it rests. The peduncle that attaches it to its fruit projects the leaf beyond the cornice, allowing the painter to continue the gap. The leaf captures a diaphanous ray of light, becoming the luminous center of the canvas, surreptitiously destabilizing the horizontal deployment traced by the arrangement of the fruit. A diagonal appears through this ray of light. It colors the other leaves in its path with metallic reflections.
This brings a slight dynamism to an otherwise linear arrangement.
The slightly overhanging frontal light illuminates the entire composition evenly.
The extremely stretched pictorial material, with a grain as soft as marble, reveals, as does the uniform, silvery lighting, the influence of Willem van Aelst (Rotterdam 1627 - 1683), an influence to which we shall return.
In addition to the extreme care taken in the rendering of objects - which is the most convincing legacy of Flemish-Dutch culture in the work studied here: note the moiré effect of the plums surrounded by a ring of light, the brittleness of the stone that cracks here and there, and note the tearing, yellowing and metallic sheen of the leaves - the canvas adds a frieze composition associated with an antique cornice, the realization of which can only be envisaged in Paris. Indeed, between 1645 and 1660, a group of painters, including Paul Liégeois (active in Paris between 1650 and 1660) and Pierre Dupuis (Montfort-l'Amaury 1610 - Paris 1682) developed a specific production in close dialogue with Willem van Aelst, active in France and particularly in Paris, between 1645 and 1651, of which the work examined here offers a very fine example.

In particular, the work reveals the ancestry of Pierre Dupuis, to whom the painting had previously been attributed. This ancestry manifests itself not only in the use of a piece of cornice to support a fruit display but, more profoundly, in an “altered” naturalism at work in a detail that we don't immediately notice. In fact, between the line of plums in the foreground and the little pyramid they form in the background, there's an almost perfect square formed by four plums on top of each other. But such a scaffold is virtually impossible according to the laws of physics. Like the famous Carpe by Sebastien Stoskopff (Strasbourg 1597 - Idstein 1657), of which there are variants and copies1 , the supernatural grace of such a detail is there to signify the deceptive nature of sensory perception. However, it is a characteristic of French still lifes of the first half of the 17th century to convey, through the representation of dead and motionless things, moral warnings, even vanities, which dispense with the exhibition of its most obvious symbol, the skull and crossbones. In this production, the painter sublimates a figuration that would otherwise be purely naturalistic, using deviations as minute as they are precise, to alert us to the meaning of what we are contemplating.
It is not the object contemplated that holds its mystery, but something more obscure and profound that transcends it. Thus, the ancient ruins topped with fruit that Dupuis stages invite us to meditate on the passage of time2.
This is undoubtedly the most original contribution of French still-life production to Europe's rich still-life season.
still life season in Europe.
The singular beauty of this detail is also in keeping with the French fascination with geometrical painting, which was stimulated at the same time by debates on the application of perspective to painting at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, notably through the teaching of Abraham Bosse (Tours 1602/1604 - Paris 1676).

RELATED WORKSAmong the works by Abraham DE LUST that can be compared to the canvas under consideration here, we would like to mention the
Nature morte aux pêches et raisins dans un panier d'osier signed “a. d. lust” in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
which contemporary critics date to precisely the same years4 , and the two counterparts in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Brunswick, both signed5. In particular, the two Brunswick canvases feature the same cornice decorated with oves and stings that we see in the painting studied here. Abraham DE LUST probably inherited this motif - magnified by Pierre Dupuis, as we have seen - from Jean-Michel Picart (Antwerp circa 1600 - Paris 1682), a painter and art dealer who was the most important point of reference in Paris for the community of Nordic painters active in the capital, and whom Van Aelst certainly also approached6. The motif of the cornice decorated with oves and stings, combined with a glass or lapis vase of flowers mounted in gold in the manner of Picart, which Abraham DE LUST often painted, also appealed to Jacques-Samuel Bernard7, another painter active in Paris at the same time, like the Parisian Van Aelst, of which the Vase en verre monté en or in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen is an example8.

Another example is the Self-Portrait by Bartholomeus van der Helst (Haarlem 1613 - Amsterdam 1670), dated 1655, in the Toledo Museum of Art9 , whose surrounding vineyard and butterflies can be attributed to Abraham DE LUST, according to Fred Mejer10 , and in which, as in the canvas studied, we find the elegance of the drawing, a similar subdued, silvery light exalted by greens that are both glaucous and milky, and the same extraordinarily stretched pictorial material that ours borrows from Van Aelst, such as his hammered, undulating leaves with their lacunae, exactly as in the painting studied here.

Provenance: Paris Galerie de Jonckheere