Allegorical Still Life with Fruits and Wine

Across the upper left corner of this still life Bernard painted four short rhyming lines in deliberately old-fashioned French spelling, and the first of them has given the picture its other name, Bois à ton soûl, drink your fill. The rest keeps up the same invitation to eat and drink. Below the verse lie fruit and wine, and the canvas is dated 1891 at the lower right, the year Bernard turned 23. It belonged to a friend from his student days in Paris, the Belgian painter Eugène Boch. Both had trained in the studio of Fernand Cormon, and Boch, whose family ran the Villeroy and Boch porcelain works, used his means to support painters he believed in, Bernard among them. Vincent van Gogh had painted Boch at Arles in 1888, a thin bearded face against a deep blue sky scattered with stars, and called the picture The Poet. The friendship lasted, and the two men died in the same year, 1941, Boch in January and Bernard in April. The still life stayed in the Boch family until the London dealers Stoppenbach and Delestre sold it.