Still Life with Wafer Biscuits

Around 1631 Lubin Baugin set a pewter plate of rolled wafers, a glass of wine and a straw-covered flask on a blue cloth. He borrowed the format from the north, the kind of still life the Dutch and Flemish made of a corner of table seen slightly from above, now usually called a breakfast piece. The Louvre draws attention to its geometry, the ovals of plate and flask, the cylinders of the wafers, the many-sided glass, the block of the table. It even quotes Paul Cézanne, writing in 1904 that nature should be treated through the cylinder, the sphere and the cone. The wine is so pale it is probably clairet, a light red much drunk in Paris at the time. Near the corner of the cloth, low on the right, the painter lettered his name as BAVGIN.