Jean-Michel Picart

After training in Antwerp, he moved to Paris where he had a brilliant career and became court painter to king Louis XIV.

He was active as a flower painter and enjoyed the patronage of Gaston Henri de Bourbon, the nominal bishop of Metz and later Duke of Verneuil.

[7] In 1640, Picart was admitted to the Académie de Saint-Luc (Academy of Saint Luke), the guild of painters and sculptors of Paris.

[6] The French chronicler André Félibien described Picart in his 1666-8 treatise Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes as one of the important artists of his time who ran a workshop of painter copyists hailing mostly from Flanders or the Dutch Republic.

He dealt in Dutch and Flemish landscapes, hunting scenes by Frans Snyders and small religious compositions.

A Bouquet of flowers in a vase decorated with gilt bronze (1648, Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon) is a rare signed and dated work.

[15] According to Curt Benedict, it was the Still life of flowers in a glass vase of the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole, which allowed the French art historian Michel Faré to attribute a number of works to Picart.

[17] Later he was able to merge his Flemish realism with its painstaking attention to detail with the demand at the court of Louis XIV for more extravagant, lush floral arrangements.

[19] His ability to render every detail meticulously can be seen in the Still life with spring flowers on a ledge (early 1650s, at Dorotheum Vienna on 25 April 2017, lot 93) in which he carefully depicts the defects on the fruit peel as well as the withering leaves and the rich cloth covering the table and the curtains in the background.