It and Nicolas Lancret's The Ham Dinner were commissioned by Louis XV to decorate the dining room in the lesser apartments at the Palace of Versailles.

This painting was commissioned by King Louis XV from the painter Jean-François de Troy, for the dining room of the small apartments of the Palace of Versailles, who produced it in 1735.

At the same time, he produced two other paintings for the king's apartments : Le Déjeuner de Chasse (Musée du Louvre),[1] as well as a Deer at bay.

During the Restoration, in 1817, Louis-Philippe I, then Duke of Orléans, claimed the work as well as its pendant because, according to him, they came, wrongly, from the collection of the Regent, his ancestor.

According to medical works of the time, oysters were then renowned for their aphrodisiac virtues: this belief could explain why the painting depicts only men and not a single woman, unlike its counterpart, Le Déjeuner de Jamon.

This masculine exclusivity can also be explained by the fact that it was intended for the decoration of a dining room "back from the hunt", essentially occupied by men.

[7] The decor of the room, sumptuous, takes up in its upper part a work by Jean-François de Troy himself:[4] it is Zephyr and Flora (private collection, around 1725-1726).