Still Life with a Northern Lapwing and a Ruff
Signed by the artist, ‘Still Life with a Northern Lapwing and a Ruff’ is a unique still life by François Boucher to have surfaced. It was discovered by Nicholas Hall and Agnews in 2025 and sold to a private collector.
Signature
Signed, lower left: ‘f. Boucher’
Provenance
Private collection, France
Pescheteau-Badin, Paris, Works of Art and Furnishings, 12 December 2025, lot 133
where acquired by Nicholas Hall and Agnews
by whom sold to a Private Collection
Still Life with a Northern Lapwing and a Ruff represents a rare and precious foray by François Boucher into the genre of still life painting. Signed ‘f. Boucher’ this unique still life is the first by the artist to have resurfaced. By the quality of its execution, confident brushwork, controlled impasto, and meticulous rendering of textures—particularly the feathers—it demonstrates the skills of Francois Boucher at the height of his powers. The dominance of blacks subtly nuanced with deep greens, the compositional balance, and the elegance of the painterly surface date the work to around 1745, at a moment when Boucher was moving away from the 17th-century Northern influences that had shaped his early work. The painting is a double homage to both the Flemish artist Jan Fyt and Boucher’s compatriot Jean Siméon Chardin, but it is also an ode from the artist-collector to his beloved cabinet of curiosities.
During his stay in Paris in 1766–77, the Savoyard Marquis, Henri Joseph Costa de Beauregard (1752–1824), marvelled at Boucher’s cabinet of curiosities and their ‘infinite number of the most beautiful minerals, corals, all sorts of marine plants, and petrifications: he has an immense natural history cabinet.. It is the most beautiful thing one could possibly see. It was there that I saw beautiful butterflies. Some of them, with their wings outstretched, are at least half a foot wide…The whole thing is arranged with great artistry and taste’. In La Conchliologie nouvelle et portative, published in 1767, the author, Antoine Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville (1680–1765) specifies that ‘this ingenious painter has placed his shells on tables covered with mirrors; they present to the viewer an enamelled display that seems to rival nature. To the left upon entering, one finds a mirrored cabinet filled with madrepores, minerals, and pebbles, which are of great beauty’. The King’s First Painter, a regular client of the Parisian marchand-mercier Lazare Duvaux (ca. 1703–1758), from whom he acquired pagodas, potpourri jars, Chinese porcelain, vases, and marbles between 1749 and 1757, also showed a predilection for Chinese bronzes, lacquerware, coral, larra stone, madrepores, meandrinas, and fungivores.
A discerning collector of prints after the Northern schools, Boucher owned a fine collection of Duch and Flemish paintings and drawings, whose techniques he knew intimately, and which profoundly influenced some of his own work. He owned, for example, Willem Kalf’s (1619–1693) Kitchen Interior, now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, whose affinity with the still life in the foreground of La Belle Cuisinière, painted in the early 1730s (Paris, Musée Cognacq-Jay), is strikingly evident. This painting was, in fact, catalogued by the expert Rémy in 1771, not as a work by Boucher but as a Kalf, during the inventory taken after the death of Charles Louis d’Albert, 5th Duke of Luynes (1717–1771). Boucher was by no means the only 18th-century history, landscape, or portrait painter to occasionally—and sometimes uniquely—depict inanimate objects; among others, Nicolas de Largillière, Pierre Subleyras, Hugues Taraval, Jean-Étienne Liotard, Joseph-Marie Vien, and even the sculptor Jean-Antione Houdon (e.g., The Dead Thrush, private collection) and Francisco Goya did so. While some of Boucher’s genre scenes from the early 1730s—such as La Belle Cuisinière, La Belle Villageoise, or Le Retour du marché—include elements of still life, this canvas is stylistically closer to the hunting trophies seen at the foot of Diana at her Bath (fig. 1, Musée du Louvre, 1742) or in The Rest of Diana’s Nymphs after the Hunt (fig. 2, Musée Cognacq-Jay, 1745, inv. J.10).
This type of subject is reminiscent of the work of Jean-Baptiste Oudry, who specialized in it and with whom Boucher was closely associated (he was godfather to Oudry’s daughter) from the 1730s. Their collaboration at the Beauvais manufactory from 1736, as well as Boucher’s acquisition before 1739 of Oudry’s Still Life with Partridge and Hare (fig. 3, today at Drottningholm Palace, inv. DRH 26), attest to their artistic dialogue.
Although many of Boucher’s still lifes have disappeared, we know from the memoirs of his pupil Johann-Christian von Mannlich (1741–1822) (French edition, 1949, p. 217) that he painted each morning for two hours the objects within his reach, meticulously applying Oudry’s principles as set out in his lecture, Manière d’étudier la couleur en comparant les objets entre eux (Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture, 1749).
This still life fully demonstrates that practice: it combines illusionism inherited from 17th-century Dutch trompe-l’oeil (raised nail, glint of light, knotted cord) with the sensuality characteristic of Rocaille aesthetics. The paint, fluid and lightly impastoed—particularly in the blue-gray tones of the feathers—indicates a work conceived for a discerning collector. The discreet signature, well integrated into the painted surface, also suggests a commission rather than a mere studio exercise.
The writer Louis Petit de Bachaumont (1690–1771) highlighted the multifaceted talents of this history painter, who ‘also excels in landscapes, Bamboccciantis, grotesques, and ornaments in the style of Antoine Watteau. He also paints flowers, fruit, animals, architecture, and small gallant and fashion subjects, etc.’ The present painting constitutes another feat, in which he rivals his predecessors. As Alexis Merle du Bourg, author of the most insightful study on Northern influences in Chardin’s work, observes, ‘this type of minimalist composition (a few pieces of game, a stone table) immediately evokes a long line of 17th Century Dutch and Flemish painters….However, two reservations are necessary: the lighting, generally a pronounced chiaroscuro, often dramatic, and above all the execution, in almost all of these masters, of a meticulous and polished descriptive detail’. With sagacity, Alexis Merle du Bourg nevertheless urges caution: ‘Conversely, Chardin—and here Boucher—adopts a broader and more fluid brushstroke, moving away from this petty, sometimes narrow-minded, style to join, in certain respects, the tradition of history painters. Chardin, in a concise formula, paints humble subjects with great skill’.
One artist, however, sometimes seems to anticipate this trend: Jan Fyt of Antwerp. Not the Fyt of large, baroque, and overabundant works, but the Fyt of small paintings with thick impasto and a lively brushstroke, less decorative than authentically ‘artistic’. It is thus interesting to compare the present painting to Jan Fyt’s Still Life with Birds (The Hague, Mauritshuis), as suggested by Alexis Merle du Bourg, or even to Jean Siméon Chardin’s 1732 still life in the Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai, which features a partridge, a woodcock, a red-legged partridge, a bitter orange, and, a hoopoe (fig. 4). Equally illuminating is a comparison with the previously mentioned Still Life with a Partridge and a Rabbit by Oudry, now in the Nationalmuseum, Drottningholm. The eloquent colours of the present painting are certainly among the finest studies of ashy hues from the mid-18th century, and brilliant refutes the sarcasm sometimes directed at Boucher’s palette. Suffice it to recall Diderot’s acerbic judgment at the Salon of 1763: ‘As for colour, order your chemist to perform a detonation, or rather a deflagration, of copper with saltpeter, and you will see it as it appears in Boucher’s painting. It is the colour of a fine Limoges enamel. If you ask the painter:“But, Monsieur Boucher, where did you get these tones of colour?” he will answer you, “In my head… But they are false”. As Carole Blumenfeld wrote in September 2025: ‘This painting offers the artist an admirable pretext to play with whites and greens, and to demonstrate, almost two decades ahead of its time, that his colour could be as eloquent, as truthful, as nature itself’.