21/06/2026
A still life of striking serenity, attributed to Michel Boyer (Le Puy, 1668 – Paris, 1724) — one of the most elusive figures in the history of French painting.
Boyer was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1701, and appointed Conseiller following the death of Jean-Baptiste Blain de Fontenay, peintre ordinaire du Roi. Yet of his work as a still life painter, only a single canvas can be attributed to him with certainty: Bass, Music Book and Sword, signed and dated 1693, in the Louvre. It is around that exceptional and little-known work — with its austere composition, its deliberate surrender of pictorial space, its quality of absolute concentration — that the present attribution rests.
The objects gathered here place the composition with some precision within the cultural world of the late 17th-century French court. The five-stringed guitar was the instrument of choice among the most refined circles of the age. Francesco Corbetta — who came to Paris through Cardinal Mazarin, became guitar master to the young Louis XIV, and later taught at the court of Charles II in London — and his successor Robert de Visée, who dedicated his Livre de guittare to the King in 1682, defined the repertoire to which this open tablature in French notation almost certainly belongs. That the manuscript appears unfinished, rather than printed, has led to the suggestion that the composition may constitute a private homage to one of these composers — music not performed, but commemorated.
The tradition of the musical instrument still life, presented on a richly draped Turkish carpet, dates back to the Bergamasque painter Evaristo Baschenis (1617–1677), whose influence Boyer is thought to have experienced first-hand during his documented stay in Rome in 1689. What distinguishes this composition from its Baroque precedents is precisely the absence of accumulation: the objects inhabit the upper third of the canvas with an almost weightless presence, suspended above the heavy folds of the carpet, bathed in a lateral light of great delicacy.
The folded letter, its addressee's name erased by time, and the watch — whose pierced case suggests it once struck the hours — carry the composition beyond the still life proper. Together with the silent guitar and the unfinished score, they form an allegory of hearing, or perhaps of the irretrievable moment of music itself.
Bonne Fête de la Musique.
🔗 canesso.art
