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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

More Artwork

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Panthers of Bacchus Eating Grapes, Alexandre François Desportes French, Oil on paper, laid down on card (paste-paper)
Panthers of Bacchus Eating Grapes
Alexandre François Desportes
ca. 1719–20
River Landscape, Alexandre François Desportes French, Oil on paper, laid down on wood
River Landscape
Alexandre François Desportes
ca. 1690–1700
Aegina Visited by Jupiter, Jean-Baptiste Greuze French, Oil on canvas
Aegina Visited by Jupiter
Jean-Baptiste Greuze
ca. 1767–69
The Trojan Women Setting Fire to Their Fleet, Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellée) French, Oil on canvas
The Trojan Women Setting Fire to Their Fleet
Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellée)
ca. 1643
Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, Marie Gabrielle Capet (1761–1818) and Marie Marguerite Carraux de Rosemond (1765–1788), Adélaïde Labille-Guiard French, Oil on canvas
Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, Marie Gabrielle Capet (1761–1818) and Marie Marguerite Carraux de Rosemond (1765–1788)
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard
1785

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