The market surprises us again by lowering the hammer at more than 26 million euros for this exquisite still life, titled The cut melon (1760), which was the most notable work of the Old Masters auction in which paintings by Watteau and Hubert Robert, among others, were also auctioned.
In this work, as we published on June 6, the painter opted for an oval format, which was very unusual in his production with the aim of highlighting the attribute of intimacy that he wanted to confer on the scene. Perhaps the Parisian painter wanted to suspend time in those poetic atmospheres that he used to create, a magical halo that came out of his palette.
The cut melon It was exhibited in 1761 for the first time and then passed through several private collections, among others that of François Martial Marcille, later that of the dealer Stéphane Bourgeois who acquired it for Baroness Nathaniel de Rothschild, who knew how to put together a cabinet of treasures. Her descendants decided to sell this work through Christie’s Paris auction held yesterday.
Jean-Simeón Chardin (Paris, 1699) specialized in still lifes and in reflecting aspects of daily life in his works. He was sober in his color palette but very detailed in the elements that he fixed in his oil paintings, which contrasted with the baroque prevailing in the 18th century. He lived to be 80 years old and bequeathed to posterity a corpus of works increasingly recognized by museums and collectors, among others The line, The blessing or the two still lifes that have achieved two consecutive records at auctions: Strawberry basket and The cut melon, with 24 and 26.73 million, respectively.
