Jean Frédéric Couty - Still Life With Artichokes And Cherries

Jean Frédéric COUTY Issoudun, 1829 - 1904 Oil on canvas 47 x 61 cm (63.5 x 79 cm) Signed and dated lower left "JFCouty / 1899" Very beautiful wooden frame and gilded stucco decorated with palmettes Jean Frédéric Couty is a French painter born in Issoudun. Author of still lifes and landscapes, he was a student of Billoux and he exhibited in Paris between 1864 and 1867. A still life of fish by Couty is kept at the Louviers Museum in Normandy. This very beautiful still life, in very good condition, is a very decorative painting with its beautiful colors, the red of the cherries and the green of the artichokes in particular. The artichoke is traditionally seen as a sign of abundance and prosperity. It also evokes inner wealth and the gradual discovery of beauty. The cherry is often associated with femininity, fertility and even immortality. If we add the two carafes filled with wine - white and red - represented here, we can think that this painting wants to symbolize the different forms of abundance whether it is wealth, opulence and fertility.
Another meaning is possible: it could be an allegory of pleasure with the exotic element (the artichoke), intoxication (the wine) and the sweetness of Paradise and Religion (the cherry). We think of Baudelaire’s famous poem “Enivrez-vous”: “One must always be drunk. It's all there: that's the only question. To avoid feeling the horrible burden of Time which breaks your shoulders and bends you towards the earth, you must intoxicate yourself without respite. But of what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But get drunk. (...)”