Jean Siméon Chardin’s 1760 painting The Cut Melon is officially headed to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, after a failed attempt to win it at auction.
Last June, the Chardin painting set a new record for the artist when it sold for $30.3 million at Christie’s France to then-unknown Italian real estate investor Nanni Bassani Antivari. At the time, it seemed like a disappointing miss for the Kimbell Art Museum, who was the underbidder on the work.
In 2022, the museum had tried and failed to acquire Chardin’s Basket of Wild Strawberries (1761), after France declared the work a national treasure, allowing the Louvre to step in to purchase the work for its collection.
But then, this past December, the Art Newspaper revealed that not only had Antivari not paid for The Cut Melon, but that Christie’s was suing him for non-payment. While that case has not yet been settled, the future of The Cut Melon has.
On Wednesday, the Kimbell announced that it had acquired the work directly from the painting’s owners, the descendants of Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild, an arts patron who acquired the work in 1876.
In an interview with ARTnews, museum director Eric Lee called the painting and Basket of Wild Strawberries the “two most important Chardin still lifes that were still in private hands.”
“In my opinion, The Cut Melon is absolutely as wonderful as [Basket of Wild Strawberries]. I just could not be more thrilled to be able to acquire it,” Lee said. “I was so sad when we lost the painting at auction and when this came back around it was almot like a miracle. The painting is so right for the collection. It looks like it’s always been here and it seems impossible to think of the Kimbell without this painting.”
Painted on a rare oval canvas nearly two feet wide, the still life features, in Lee’s estimation, a “complex composition” of rounded forms anchored by a vivid orange wedge of cantaloupe poised atop the exposed core of a sliced melon. The painting goes on view Thursday in the museum’s Louis I. Kahn building.
“You don’t see orange that often in Old Master painting paintings, and I know Kahn was very keen on the color, so it’s nice to be able to bring orange back into the galleries,” Lee said. “This is the only painting there where orange is very prominent.”
Lee said that the museum doesn’t typically make acquisitions to “fill gaps” in its collection, but it had to, in the case of The Cut Melon, because still lifes are a weakness at the Kimbell. Prior to the Chardin acquisition, the museum had still lifes by Jacques Joseph Duhen and Luis Egidio Meléndez, though it recently acquired one by Anne Vallayer-Coster. The museum currently has just one other Chardin work, Young Student Drawing (ca. 1738).
“We’ve been strengthening the collection, but then with these other still lifes, the glaring absence was a major Chardin,” Lee said. “The quiet stillness of the painting just resonates with the quiet stillness of Louis Kahn’s galleries. The architecture and the painting complement each other so well.”
