Moïse Jacobber (Blieskastel 1786-1863 Paris)
Property of a Private Collector
Moïse Jacobber (Blieskastel 1786-1863 Paris)

Roses, carnations, sweet william and other flowers in an alabaster vase, with pineapples and a basket of fruit and vegetables, on a marble ledge

Details
Moïse Jacobber (Blieskastel 1786-1863 Paris)
Roses, carnations, sweet william and other flowers in an alabaster vase, with pineapples and a basket of fruit and vegetables, on a marble ledge
oil on canvas
47 5/8 x 36 in. (120.9 x 91.5 cm.)
Provenance
with Galerie J. Kugel, Paris (according to a label on the reverse).
Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, New York, 19 May 1994, lot 130, where acquired by the present owner.
Exhibited
(Possibly) Paris, Salon, 1839, no. 1056.

Lot Essay

As an easel painting by the Moïse Jacobber, this impressive still life is relatively unusual in the artist’s oeuvre. Though a supremely talented painter in oils, Jacobber in fact spent the majority of his career as a freelance painter for the Sèvres porcelain factory. Founded in 1738 at the instigation of Louis XV and his maitresse-en-titre, Madame de Pompadour, as a rival to other leading manufactories like those at Chantilly and Meissen, the Sèvres factory quickly emerged at the forefront of European ceramic production. The enthusiastic patronage of Louis XV, an early and generous investor in the firm, and later Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, assured the Sèvres factory a dominance among upper class households during the 18th century. Even with the onset of the French Revolution in 1789 and the subsequent tumultuous political and social upheavals of the ensuing decades, Sèvres remained a dominant producer of fine porcelain and china in France and across Europe.

Born in Blieskastel in southwest Germany, Moïse Jacobber trained as a painter under the still-life specialist Gerard van Spaendonck (1746-1822) in Paris. Spaendonck had been working in Paris since 1780 and had, by the time Jacobber began his pupillage, become professor of flower painting at the Jardin des Plantes and a member of the Académie Royale, as well as miniature painter to Louis XVI. Sam Segal, who confirmed the attribution on the basis of firsthand inspection, has noted that the composition bears a number of striking resemblances to a lost painting by Spaendonck formerly in the French Royal collection (written communication, 22 October 1988). Spaendonck was an exceedingly popular painter in France, with critics writing that he had ‘no rival in the art of painting flowers, plants, fruits, nor in the art of arranging them in beautiful vases. He can only be compared…to nature that he renders in all of its freshness, its brilliance, its vivacity’ (‘Observations ou réflexions sur l'exposition des peintures, sculptures, dessins et gravures de MM. de l'Académie royale en 1783’, Mercure de France, 1783). Jacobber’s reworking of his former master’s composition here, therefore, is unsurprising.

The present canvas can be roughly dated due to the existence of a nearly identical copy of the design painted by the artist on a porcelain plaque for the Sèvres factory (fig. 1). Since it is more likely that Jacobber would have established his composition in oils first and then replicated the finished picture on the plaque, the usual dating of the Sèvres picture to c. 1837 can thus be regarded as a date for both. The plaque appears to have been one of the works exhibited by Jacobber at the Paris Salon of 1839 where it was recorded as ‘1057 - Fleurs d’après Van Spaendonck; porcelaine’. Alongside his painting on porcelain, Jacobber exhibited an oil, referred to in the Salon catalogue only as ‘1056-Fleurs et fruit’, and, given this description, it is tempting to hypothesize that Jacobber might have exhibited his porcelain next to the oil on which it was based.

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