National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA (West Building, Main Floor, Gallery 53)
Location History:
The painting was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in 2012 through the Chester Dale Fund. It had previously appeared at a sale at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris on November 29, 1973 (lot 12bis). Provenance prior to this is not fully detailed in the museum's online records. The work is currently on view.
The Flemish-born painter Nicasius Bernaerts, a pupil of Frans Snyders, taught him in Paris. This legacy was a mixed inheritance, importing a robust Northern tradition of abundance into a French courtly context. By the time the king and his court hunted near Fontainebleau or Compiègne, Desportes was there with a small notebook, sketching the day's take on location. Louis XIV and later Louis XV would then select which spoils were to be elevated into finished oils, destined for the royal residences of Versailles, Marly, and Meudon. Prior to this, Desportes spent a year in Poland painting the court of King John III Sobieski, a formative detour that broadened his skills before his definitive return to Paris.
Executed in oil on canvas and measuring 121 by 95 centimetres, this is a kitchen-side inventory of the chase. This striking still-life painting was created by one of the greatest French artists of the genre. Desportes arranged the spoils in a compressed, almost claustrophobic frieze across a wooden tabletop close to the viewer, with no landscape to soften its material presence.
His trained eye observed the tell-tale marks of one who has lingered on the butchered and prepared carcass. He depicted the pheasants' pimpled skin, webbed feet, and curving claws with almost disturbing clarity. Even more revealing is his attention to the 'sculpted lard encasings' enveloping the dressed pheasants displayed on a golden stand, and the rack of lamb, translucent flesh hanging beside solid white bone. The composition fuses Flemish lavishness with precise observation of a distinctly French table. The bone-handled knife, copper pot, and silver platter all signal domestic finery, situating the scene within a noble household. In France, Desportes followed the Flemish still-life tradition that was popular in Paris and that he absorbed from his teacher Bernaerts but developed a reduced, harmonious colour scheme and more dramatic compositions. He worked in a period immediately preceding that of Jean Siméon Chardin, whose still-life paintings are among the great strengths of the Gallery's collection of French paintings.
Desportes forced the spectator to acknowledge the sheer artistic prowess with which this tour de force self-consciously negotiates the uneasy relationship of beautiful and bizarre. Ultimately, this is a performance of technical bravado, a painting less about the spoils of the hunt than about the artist's power to transfigure the grotesque into an object of courtly delectation.
Interestingly, this painting appears to revere this spread as a demonstration of hunting prowess, paired with fresh fruit to add both colour, variety and balance.
