Strawberries taste good

A Chardin still life makes a record price in a good week for French and Italian art

- Huon Mallalieu

THE rebuke 'Your eyes were bigger than your stomach' will have been shamingly obvious to all of us at some point. I recently experienced it more or less in reverse. My eyes initially reacted to Le panier des fraises des bois by Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) with distaste, which I then realised was triggered by my stomach–I can no longer eat strawberries, even wild ones, as they are a gout trigger. When I looked at the 15in by 19in still life properly, my aesthetic assessment was quite different.

Unlike many Dutch 17thcentury still lifes (still even, silent lives), 18th-century French natures mortes of this kind do not tell stories or point to morals, the intention is to provoke an emotional response to beauty and harmony. In this one, exhibited in 1761, the pyramid of fruit, however beautifully painted, would probably not do the job without the accompanying glass, carnations, cherries, and peach, which make the composition a triangle within a pentagon, to greater harmonious effect. As it is, this simple-seeming painting could happily be contemplated for hours, even by the gouty.

Last November, Christie's Paris took a record €7.11 million for a Chardin genre painting of a maid filling a bucket from a water cistern; that record was comprehensively trashed by the €24,381,000 (820.6 million) made by Le panier des fraises des a bois with Artcurial and the Turquin dealership on March 24. It came from the descendants of François Marcille (1790–1856), who had built up a massive collection of 18th-century paintings, including 40 Bouchers, 30 Chardin's, and 25 Fragonards, many bought in flea markets as 18thcentury art was still deeply unfashionable after the Revolution. It would be fascinating to know what he paid for this one.