NICOLAS-HENRY JEAURAT DE BERTRY | STILL LIFE OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS, A GLOBE AND OTHER OBJECTS ON A TABLE DRAPED IN A RED VELVET CLOTH, WITH A YOUNG GIRL HOLDING A BOW

Anonymous sale ("Property of a Gentleman"), London, Sotheby's, 8 July 1999, lot 219;

There acquired for $53,738. 

Jeaurat de Bertry was born in Paris in the generation following Jean-Baptiste Chardin, and the influence of that master on his work is unmistakable, especially in the younger artist's tables de cuisine or kitchen still lifes, of which this painting is a particularly fine and large scale example.  A pupil of his uncle Etienne Jeaurat, who was a professor at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Jeaurat de Bertry, somewhat unusually, was both nominated and accepted into the Académie on the same day, 31 January 1756. Only five years later, in 1761, he was named peintre de la Reine to Queen Marie Leczinska, consort of Louis XV. Thereafter, the painter set up residence in Versailles, where he remained until the consort's death in 1768. In his later career, Jeaurat de Bertry turned to portraiture and landscape painting, but it is for his considerable skill as a still life painter that he is best known today.