The most beautiful French still life?

The most beautiful French still life?

It is because of Pascal Quignard, who writes of the painting in All the World’s Mornings (1991), an exquisite novel Alain Corneau adapted into a film the same year, that I came back up to see Lubin Baugin’s The Dessert of Wafers, painted around 1631 (Sully, room 911). In the novel, the composer Sainte-Colombe, a melancholy widower living in seclusion with his two daughters, refuses to appear at the court of Louis XIV, and has Marin Marais as his pupil. It was Sainte-Colombe who commissioned this painting from Lubin Baugin. At night, his wife’s ghost comes to visit him and sits at the table before the glass of wine, the wicker-covered bottle, the tin plate containing a few fine wafers the French call oublies (“forgettings”), and she listens to him play the viola. The painting’s geometric purity—the plane and lines of the table, ellipses of the plate and its shadow, transparent angles of the glass, curves of the bottle, cylinders of the wafers—makes it an ideal work to accompany the sublimity that Sainte-Colombe seeks in his art. Some say this jewel, an exception among Baugin’s religious works, is the most beautiful still life in the Louvre. It is certainly the most harmonious.