Anne Vallayer-Coster

Anne Vallayer-Coster;
Her deceased sale, Paris, Paillet, 21 June 1824, lot 31;
Cournerie collection;
Estate sale, Paris, Féral, 8-9 December 1891, lot 36;
Léonce Coblentz;
Felix Doistau by 1908;
His sale, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 9 June 1909, lot 77;
Georges B. Lasquin;
His sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 21-23 November 1932, lot 424;
Doistau collection;
Their sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 5-6 March 1937, lot 31;
Art market, Paris;
With Saam Nijstad, The Hague;
M. Ph. van Ommeren collection, Rotterdam, 1970;
From whom purchased by Saam and Lily Nijstad.

Paris, Salon, 1787, no. 72;
Paris, L'Hôtel des négociants en objets d'art, tableaux, et curiosités, Exposition des femmes peintres du XVIIIe siècle, 1926, no. 91;
London, Royal Academy of Arts, France in the 18th Century, 1968, no. 690, reproduced fig. 201;
Washington Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 30 June - 25 September 2002; Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art, 13 October 2002 - 5 January 2003; New York, The Frick Collection, 21 January - 23 March 2003, Anne Vallayer-Coster, Painter to the Court of Marie-Antoinette, no. 83;
Marseille, Centre de la Vieille Charité, Un peintre a la cour de Marie-Antoinette, 12 April - 23 June 2003.

Journal de Paris, no. 262, 19 September 1787;
Lanlaire au Salon académique de peinture par M.L.B...de plusieurs académies, Paris 1787;
M. Roland Michel, Anne Vallayer-Coster: 1717-1818, Paris 1970, cat. no. 227;
M. and F. Faré, La vie silencieuse en France: La nature morte au XVIIIe siècle, Paris 1976, p. 235, fig. 371;
A. Polak, Glass: Its Makers and Its Public, London 1999, fig. 73;
E. Kahng and M. Roland Michel (eds), Anne Vallayer-Coster, Painter to the Court of Marie-Antoinette, exhibition catalogue, London 2002, pp. 155, 211, cat. no. 83, reproduced in colour plate 41 and pp. 114-15;
L'EXPRESS mag (magazine supplement), 'Musées, le Printemps des mystères', 1 May 2003, p. 48, reproduced in colour;
P. Sanchez, Dictionnaire des Artistes Exposant dans les Salons XVII et XVIIIeme Siècles à Paris et en Province, vol. III, Dijon 2004, p. 1643.

The following condition report is provided by Simon Parkes who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is in remarkable condition. The canvas has a fairly old lining. The paint layer is stable and seems to have been recently cleaned. The painting should be hung as is. There are remnants of old varnish visible under ultraviolet light. If there are any retouches they are beautifully applied and seem to be invisible to identification under ultraviolet light. A few spots of retouch are expected to exist, perhaps around the edges, yet within the body of the picture itself there do not appear to be any damages or retouches of note. The very lively paint layer is in beautiful state, even in the loaf of bread on the right side which is painted with very soft and fickle glazes.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

This is a remarkable still life by Vallayer-Coster, a work that she exhibited at the Salon of 1787, the year when it was painted, but which she kept thereafter, and which was in her collection when she died.  Although she painted still lifes of game throughout most of her career, and especially in 1786 and 1787, this is her only fish still life (cooked lobsters do occur in two works of widely differing dates).  Mackerel are very rarely seen in still lifes by any artist, perhaps because they do not stay fresh for long, and what is remarkable about this picture, is that they are clearly fresh.  This should have been impossible in Paris before the advent of refrigeration and railways, and we have no record of a visit to the coast by the artist in 1787 or in any other year, so it is far from clear where she might have seen such fish.

It was as Anne Vallayer that she moved into apartments in the Louvre in 1780, where she was the only female artist with lodgings of her own.  In the following year, on 21st April, she married Jean-Pierre-Silvestre Coster, a lawyer from Nancy, who held posts in the French government, and thereafter she was known as Vallayer-Coster.