Still Life with Silver

1720s
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 629
If Jean Siméon Chardin explored humble still life, artists like Desportes, who worked for Louis XIV and Louis XV, continued the tradition’s most opulent vein. This painting replicates the ostentatious display of actual dining room buffets of symmetrically arranged objects that attested to their owner’s buying power and global reach. This example includes heavily wrought and gilded silver trays and ewers, Japanese Kakiemon and Imari porcelain bowls, and mounted vessels of jasper and agate. Stylistically, the dates of most of the objects depicted are slightly earlier than the painting, perhaps a function of the fact that by the 1720s the dining rooms of many newly built Parisian residences incorporated not actual buffets but vibrant canvases such as this.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Still Life with Silver
  • Artist: Alexandre François Desportes (French, Champigneulle 1661–1743 Paris)
  • Date: 1720s
  • Medium: Oil on canvas
  • Dimensions: 103 x 73 3/4 in. (261.6 x 187.3 cm)
  • Classification: Paintings
  • Credit Line: Purchase, Mary Wetmore Shively Bequest, in memory of her husband, Henry L. Shively, M.D., 1964
  • Object Number: 64.315
  • Curatorial Department: European Paintings

Audio

Cover Image for 2328. Still Life with Silver

2328. Still Life with Silver

Inspiring Walt Disney

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PAIGE O'HARA:
This painting by Alexandre François Desporte depicts the splendid hospitality of an 18th century court banquet, where the interplay between food and music, dance and decoration was designed with a supreme goal: to impress guests.

On the bottom tier, we see enormous silver urns and gold-plated platters. Above, on the second tier, is a tureen with dragon handles, imported blue and white Japanese porcelain, and vessels carved from stone. At the very top, presiding over the festivities, is the marble mask of a satyr, a figure associated with pleasure in Greek mythology. His cheeky grin recalls the character “Lumiere” from Beauty and the Beast.

The porcelain displayed in front, was produced at the Sèvres manufactory, located just outside of Paris. Dishes like these would have graced an aristocratic table of the era.

WOLF BURCHARD:
You have all these different shapes that are elaborately modeled and painted. It’s suggestive of how 18th century tables were animated through porcelain. It’s this idea of ephemeral entertaining and giving your guests joy through food underlined by the way you’re serving it. You’re not serving it in ordinary dishes, but using the most exquisite porcelain that is available, and Sèvres was producing, at the time, the most elaborate porcelain.

PAIGE O'HARA:
During one of the liveliest scenes featured in Beauty and the Beast, the household objects welcome Belle to the castle with a grand meal, as they sing “Be our guest! Be our guest!” reminding her that a French meal is “never second best.”

Thanks to its memorable music, charming characters, and artistic and technical innovation, Beauty and the Beast became a phenomenal success. In 1991 it was the first animated feature film to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, but the roots of some of its inspiration stretch back centuries.

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