Still Life with Brioche, Fruit and Vegetables

A brioche, a knife, grapes and garden produce are set out on a plain ledge, the crust, the bloom of the fruit and the greens played off against one another with the close attention to surface that made Anne Vallayer-Coster one of the most admired still-life painters of her day. She was admitted to the Académie royale in 1770, at a time when the genre still ranked low, and built her reputation on precisely such modest table pieces — studied from the Dutch tradition and from Chardin’s example, but observed with an accuracy and a quiet gravity of her own. The canvas is signed and dated 1775. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.