GARNIER, François

French painter. He is well known mainly for the fact that he was Louise Moillon's father-in-law - he married her mother when she became a widow on 17th August 1620. He was described in the marriage contract as "a bourgeois living in Paris", so we can assume that he was quite a rich man. He lived in the Ile de la Cité and also sold pictures as well as being a painter - in 1627 he bought a booth at the Saint Germain fair in rue Merciere and enlarged it at a later date. When his wife died in 1630, he married Denise du Pont, the widow of Jacques Le Sage, a goldsmith.

Belonging to a family of artist-decorators active in Fontainbleau at the end of the 16th century, François Garnier founded a studio in Paris on the Pont Notre-Dame and specialised in a genreGLOSSARYIn a broad sense, the term is used to mean a particular branch or category of art; landscape and portraiture, for example, are genres of painting, and the essay and the short story are genres of literature. inherited from the Flemish and Dutch tradition: still life. A prosperous art dealer, he associated with the community of painters who worked in the quarter of the Saint-Germain fair, the real Parisian centre of this production and highly prized by art-lovers of the time.

In all probability, he was Moillon's master and through painting, formed a privileged relationship with her, with their respective works mirroring each other and even merging together.

Enamoured of the most humble reality, which he liked to depict with great accuracy, François Garnier put all his talent into portraying everyday things, such as fruit, generally red, with a predilection for plates of wild strawberries or cherries alongside gooseberry branches. His works stand out through his refusal to use over-luxuriant decorative effects in favour of more sober compositions.