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# Five years ago I watched this seventeenth-century "Holy Family with Saint Elizabeth and the Infant John the Baptist", attributed to the French painter Jacques Stella, go under the hammer and fail to sell at an estimate of 60,000 to 90,000 euros
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/piat-let-nazad-nabliudal-kak-eto-sviatoe-semeistvo-so-sviatoi-elizavetoi-i-malenkim-ioannom-krestitelem-xvii-veka-pripisyvaemoe-frantsuzskomu-khudozhniku-zhaku-stelle-prodavalos-na-aukt/
- Published: 2026-06-02T14:15:48.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:57.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Art, Museums, Observations, Paris

Five years ago I watched this seventeenth-century "Holy Family with Saint Elizabeth and the Infant John the Baptist", attributed to the French painter Jacques Stella, go under the hammer and fail to sell at an estimate of 60,000 to 90,000 euros. Today I see the familiar picture in the Louvre, hanging beside Poussin's treatment of the same subject. It turns out that this charming, intimate work by Jacques Stella, made for a private chapel, was given to the Louvre in September 2023, together with another seventeenth-century picture, an Italian one, by the Brussels patron Mr Daniel Thierry, who bought it in 2017 and in 2021 tried, unsuccessfully, to sell it. From my own experience I can say that a failed sale, or rather the impossibility of obtaining a work's true value, can sometimes move one to give the object to those who will truly appreciate it. I once did just that, when I gave the Irkutsk Regional Museum letters of the last Irkutsk Military Governor-General, Alexander Pilts, from my own collection, and they proved to be the only exhibits in the museum connected with the figure of Pilts

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_20695@02-06-2026_17-15-48.jpg)

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_20696@02-06-2026_17-15-48.jpg)

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_20697@02-06-2026_17-15-48.jpg)