Pierre-Antoine Lemoine

Pierre-Antoine Lemoine was born around 1605 in Paris and worked there as a specialist in fruit still life, a genre in which reference sources describe an extremely realistic approach to texture and surface. His still lifes carry an Italian inflection, though no source consulted identifies a specific Italian contemporary whose work he encountered directly. In 1654 he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris, and the work associated with that admission, a still life of grapes, figs, and pomegranates, is the closest thing to a documented institutional milestone in his career. No school, master, or formal training is recorded in surviving sources.

Lemoine enjoyed a strong reputation during his lifetime, according to the Web Gallery of Art, but his name fell into obscurity for centuries after his death. He died in Paris. Two independent reference sources, Wikipedia and the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art's Agorha authority file, both give the date as 19 August 1665, though neither cites a primary parish or notarial record directly, so the exact day should be treated as well-attested rather than archivally certain. His work was effectively forgotten until it was rediscovered by scholars and the market in 1992, and it has surfaced only occasionally at auction since.

Because Lemoine worked in the seventeenth century and left few surviving biographical traces, there is little modern critical writing about him from named critics in major outlets. What exists is largely descriptive: the Web Gallery of Art credits him with an extremely realistic approach to fruit and a keen sense of observation, and notes that he held a strong reputation in his own lifetime before his name fell into obscurity for centuries. No source consulted provides an attributed critical quote from a named critic or documents an active critical debate about his work.

Lemoine's market is defined by scarcity rather than volume. Artprice records only about eight lifetime auction appearances for the artist. The clearest documented sale is a still life signed P.A. LEMOINE, catalogued by Sotheby's as Nature morte aux raisins, plat de peches et potiche chinoise sur un entablement en pierre, offered as lot 8 in the 2015 Sotheby's Paris sale of the Collection Grandchamp des Raux. The price realized and the exact sale date could not be confirmed in the sources consulted, so no reliable auction record figure can be reported here.

Lemoine's market is thin and largely undocumented outside a handful of auction appearances, and no catalogue raisonne exists to anchor attribution. No dossier source confirms current gallery or estate representation, or specific museum holdings, so provenance and signature analysis, works are typically inscribed P.A. LEMOINE, carry unusual weight in any purchase decision. Buyers should also be careful with the name itself: variant spellings such as Pierre Antoine Lemoyne appear in some auction databases for the same painter, while an unrelated eighteenth and nineteenth century portraitist, Jacques Antoine Marie Lemoine, is sometimes confused with him in casual searches.