Meiffren Conte

Meiffren Conte

Marseille 1628 or 1632 - 1705

Still Life with Hercules Candlestick and Other objets de vertu

oil on canvas

canvas: 36 ? by 56 ¾ in.; 92.4 by 114.1 cm.

framed: 45 ½ by 66 ? in.; 115.6 by 168.6 cm.

Provenance
Galerie Heim-Gairac, Paris, by 1969

Dr. Claus Virch (1927-2012), New York, 1970

Private sale, Sotheby's, New York, 2015

Literature

"Meiffren Conte réapparaît," in Connaissance des Arts 216 (February 1970), p. 37, illustrated

M. Faré, Le grand siècle de la nature morte en France: le XVII^e siècle, Fribourg 1974, pp. 226-27, illustrated

N. Volle, in La peinture en Provence au XVII^e siècle, exhibition catalogue, P. Alfonsi (ed.), Marseilles 1978, pp. 18, 168, illustrated

P. Rosenberg, in France in the Golden Age: Seventeenth-Century French Paintings in American Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York 1982, pp. 239-40, cat. no. 21, illustrated pp. 208, 240

Exhibited
Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, France in the Golden Age: Seventeenth-Century French Paintings in American Collections, 29 January-28 November 1982, no. 21

Catalogue note
The French seventeenth-century painter Meiffren Conte specialized in elaborate still lifes abounding with objets de luxe. According to the collector, connoisseur, and taste-maker Pierre-Jean Mariette, Conte excelled in illustrating "carpets, armor, and gold or silver, which he painted with great veracity."¹ Conte's skill is abundantly apparent in his depiction of ornate pieces of silver- and gold-plate ware in the present work.

Anchoring the composition at left stands a monumental candlestick featuring a statuette of Hercules holding his club and sitting astride the Arcadian stag. The splendid object closely resembles one of the dozen candlesticks depicting the labors of Hercules designed by Charles Le Brun. Delivered to the goldsmiths Viocourt, Cousinet, Merlin, and Durel in 1669, the candlesticks appear in several of Conte's compositions (see for instance fig. 1), suggesting that the painter encountered the objects during his Parisian sojourn in the early 1670s.² Indeed, when King Louis XIV hosted his soirées d'appartements at Versailles, eight of the twelve candlesticks lined the silver balustrade in the Salon de Mercure. While the objects themselves were melted down in 1689 (with the rest of the royal silver), their depiction by Conte endures as a rare pictorial testament to the visual splendor that defined Versailles court life.

Conversely, the large silver charger emblazoned with a coat of arms at right and the grand ewer depicting a procession of figures (a monarch and cardinal among them) do not match with extant examples of Louis XIV's plate. Instead, they bear striking similarities to Lavazzo Tavarone's Lomellini Ewer and Basin, produced in Genoa in the early 1620s by the Flemish goldsmith Giovanni Aelbosca Belga and preserved in the Victoria & Albert Museum (fig. 2). Unlike the Hercules candlestick, Conte likely encountered such objects not in Paris, but in either Aix-en-Provence or Marseilles, where he spent most of his career (and was appointed master painter of King Louis XIV's galleys in 1675). Conte's inclusion of such a range of objects highlights the international visual exchange enjoyed among artists working across media in the seventeenth century.

Fig. 1 Meiffren Conte, Still life with Hercules candlestick and two ewers, Château de Versailles, inv. no. MV 8919.

Fig. 2 Giovanni Aelbosca Belga, after a design by Lavazzo Tavarone, Lomellini Ewer and Basin, London, Victoria & Albert Museum, inv. no. M.11A-1974.

¹ P.-J. Mariette, quoted in Rosenberg 1982, p. 240.

² Gérard Mabille, "Le mobilier d'argent de Louis XIV," in Quand Versailles était meublé d'argent, exhibition catalogue, C. Arminjon (ed.), Paris 2007, p. 76. For another example, see Still life with silver torch (Château de Versailles, inv. no. MV 8555).