Fancy some strawberries?

About the sale at Artcurial on 23 March of Chardin's "Basket of wild strawberries".

"Le Panier de fraises des bois", a masterpiece of Western painting by Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), will be presented for sale on 23 March at 6pm, n°7 rond-point des Champs-Elysées in Paris, by Artcurial's Old Masters & 19th Century department and the Turquin firm. This 38 x 46 cm oil on canvas is estimated to fetch between 12 and 15 million euros.

Of the approximately one hundred and twenty still lifes that Chardin painted, he often depicted the same objects or fruits, silver goblets, teapots, hares, plums, melons, peaches. This still life is the only one of the artist's that features a pyramid of strawberries as its main subject.

Exhibited by the artist at the Salon of 1761, rediscovered a century later by the collector François Marcille (1790-1856) or his son Eudoxe Marcille, and disappeared from public view until the 20th century retrospectives in Paris, this small canvas has become an icon of Western painting, combining a composition of great geometric simplicity with an exceptional quality of execution. Passed over in silence at the time of its creation, the Basket of Wild Strawberries has become over time one of the most famous and emblematic paintings of 18th century France, regularly reproduced on the cover of catalogues devoted to the artist. Although it has always remained in private hands, it has often been exhibited, notably on the occasion of the retrospective celebrating the bicentenary of the painter's death, organised by Pierre Rosenberg at the Grand Palais in 1979.

Heir to the rare representations of strawberry cups by 17th-century Nordic and French painters such as Jacob van Hulsdonck, Adriaen Coorte and Louyse Moillon, this painting for sale is a synthesis of two centuries, while at the same time moving resolutely towards modernity.

Here, the subject is almost less important than the representation of forms and volumes, such as the cylinder of the glass or the triangle formed by the strawberries.

Chardin is admired above all for the silence of his works, the poetry that emanates from the depiction of everyday objects, true invitations to meditation, set back from the agitation of his century. Everything is concentrated here, in this unique picture for its time.

The painting presented here is directly comparable to the Basket of Plums (Paris, Musée du Louvre) and the Glass of Water and Coffee Pot (Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute of Art), both from the same period and considered absolute masterpieces. Chardin was at the height of his powers. The painter's virtuosity is expressed in the incredible transparency of the water in the glass, the rendering of the fruit, both precise and blurred, by a single mass, all highlighted by the white spots of the two carnations whose stems break the regularity.

The modernity of Chardin's still lifes found an important echo at the time of Impressionism, notably in Fantin-Latour, Monet, Renoir... And the rigour of his geometric compositions will be found in the 20th century in Cézanne, Morandi, and even Wayne Thiebault.

As Marie Potard points out in her column "Une vente/Une œuvre", the French market had never seen so many works of art by Chardin for sale in less than six months! In November 2021, "La Fontaine", from the same Marcille collection, sold for €7.1 million at Christie's.