Still Life with Flowers in an Alabaster Vase and Fruit

A large alabaster vase adorned with gold embellishments overflows with roses, peonies and poppies in red, pink, blue, purple and white against a dark gray ground, the vase standing on a white marble surface beside a pineapple, peaches and loose clusters of green grapes, light falling from the upper left across the blossoms. Anne Vallayer-Coster, one of the most celebrated still-life painters of eighteenth-century France and a member of the Académie royale, exhibited this canvas at the Salon of 1783 and kept it for the rest of her life, refusing the repeated offers of collectors who wanted it — the artist’s own estate sale in 1824 praised it as one of her most significant works. It then vanished from view for nearly two centuries until it resurfaced in a private collection in France and was sold at Christie’s Paris in 2023, where the National Gallery of Art acquired it through the Chester Dale Fund. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.