Jean Riechers Collection: Reviving the Still Life

Members of a family of lacemaking industrialists, Jean Riechers (1898-1974) and his wife Yvonne (1905-1986) directed a world-famous company established in Calais, which from its creation in the 19 th century supplied the international luxury ready-to-wear and haute couture sector. The husband and wife had another passion: Old Master paintings. In 1934, an exhibition entitled "Les Peintres de la réalité" at the Orangerie, Paris, brought the French still life into line with modern taste. Some twenty years later, Charles Sterling published a major book on Still Life Painting from Antiquity to the Present (1952). At the end of the Second World War, Yvonne and Jean Riechers began to assemble "one of the most important and original art collections in France," according to the expert Stéphane Pinta. "They had a penchant for still lifes from the first half…