During the Eighteenth Century in France, there was a revival of interest among artists in the work of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painters, like Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-78), Cornelis Brize (1621/22-65/70), Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts (active 1657-1675), Wallerant Vaillant (1623-1677) and Edward Collier (1640 –after 1706), who had evolved a distinctive manner of trompe-l’œilstill-life in which a series of seemingly unrelated objects, or quodlibet[pocket-emptyings], are displayed against a feigned wooden panel.¹

The obvious delight that these virtuoso performances occasioned in spectators was often expressed in terms of the tried and true confusion between Art and Nature, which goes back to the Ancients.  When, for example, the Ferdinand III was given a trompe-l’œilpainting of a print attached to a board by the Strasbourg artist Sébastien Stoskopff (1597-1657), the Emperor tried to remove the print and then laughed at the deception.²

The celebrated Président de Brosse had a similar reaction in 1737 before the elaborate cut-out trompe-l’œilby Antonio Forbera, which was housed in the Chartreuse at Villeneuve until the French Revolution.³