19th century, French School, Composition of grapes, peaches, wine and bas-relief

19th century, French School

Composition of grapes, peaches, wine and bas-relief

Oil on panel, 28 x 47,5 cm

With frame, 43,5 x 63 cm

An obvious ode to wine, this painting displays the various stages of production on a single plane: from the unripe bunch of grapes to the sweet liquid ready for consumption. The implicit presence of man within this cycle, betrayed by the piece of bread and the half-emptied glass, is poetically nuanced through the classicizing bas-relief in the background. The frieze that runs across the stone, organizing a game of putti, once again refers to the bucolic and Dionysian reality once linked to this nectar. The clear and crystalline rendering of the individual grapes, bordering on transparency, connects to the veristic thrust that characterizes the entire painting: the pair of peaches shines softly, one in contact with the clear wooden surface, the other with the cold porcelain of the plate, barely warmed by a decorated ring.

The shadowy brush of this canvas allows us to identify the school of the painting as French. The chronological height, pertinent to the golden age of the nineteenth century, also confirms the singular national predilection for still life in spite of the current of Neoclassicism, prevailing in several European capitals.

The present still life, hieratic in its organization, appears as a modern votive offering to which man has already been granted his participation. In ancient times, the first scenes overflowing with fruit and vegetables instead supported the status of the patrons, resulting from a refinement of aristocratic and upper-middle-class taste that convinced the first landowners to invest in vineyards. Three-dimensional and full-bodied, the present also revalues ​​the traditional composition of fruit in a basket, offering it directly on the surface, a modern watershed between fiction and spectator.