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.

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   Alexandre François Desportes trained in the Paris studio of Flemish animal painter Nicasius Bernaerts (1620–1678), himself a pupil of Frans Snyders (1579–1657). Desportes was thus exposed to the Flemish still-life tradition from an early age and, having abandoned portraiture after a brief sojourn in Warsaw, he was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1699 as an animal painter. A favorite of both Louis XIV (1638–1715) and Louis XV (1710–1774), he painted hunting scenes for the Ménagerie at Versailles in 1700 and portraits of the King's hunting dogs, as well as other animals, still lifes, and designs for tapestries.
   Our canvas typifies the evolution of eighteenth-century still-life painting away from the intimate format of the Low Countries toward a distinctively French idiom rich in pomp and spectacle. Here gold and silver vessels are displayed on a tiered console table laden with fruit and flowers. The composition is monumental in scale. Although the canvas is not dated, the dragon-handled tureen and vermeil salvers are in the Régence style (ca. 1715–23).
   Two comparable compositions by Desportes in private collections are dated 1727 and 1740. The sides and corners of this picture had been cut, probably to set the canvas into paneling; the current corners are modern. A slightly larger copy shows the ewers and platters in their entirety.

Katharine Baetjer 2012

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