Perdrix rouge dans une niche

A red partridge hangs by one leg within a stone niche that frames the still life: a basket heaped with grapes, peaches and clusters of fruit set before it, an open pomegranate and two small dead birds at the left. The trick of setting game and fruit inside an architectural niche gives the picture the look of a collector’s display, a genre the young Nicolas de Largillierre — born in Paris, trained in Antwerp, and soon to become one of the great portrait painters of the French Baroque — painted in the early 1680s before the portraits that made his name. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.