The painting is created with a high degree of illusionism. The windowsill
and the vine that partially frames it press against the front of the picture
plane and almost into the viewer’s space. Indeed, the bubble seems to hover
in front of our eyes, so that we, like the small child, hold still in expectation.
The physical immediacy of the image commands our attention, and its
seriousness prompts our contemplation. The palette is restrained, dominated
by browns, greys, and pale greens, setting off the warm À esh tones of the
boy’s head and hands, with just a touch of rose pink in his skin and on his
coat. Chardin’s world is an arrested one, where both people and objects take
on the nature of still life.
In his genre pictures, Chardin returned to themes introduced by 17th-century
Dutch and Flemish painters. One example is The Kitchen Maid (Woman
Scraping Vegetables) (1738). This picture’s many virtues require a patient
eye and receptive mind to digest. It seems so simple: Stooping slightly, a
tired kitchen maid has paused in her work of paring vegetables. A turnip
dangles from one hand; the already scraped turnips are in the bowl of water
at her feet, next to which a pan leans against a butcher block with a cleaver
driven into it. More vegetables are in the lower left corner. The colors are
warm and rich.
But look at the forms, shapes, volumes, and weight of all these components.
One feels the weight of the cleaver, almost sensing the strength of the arm
that wielded it. All the objects on the right side coalesce around the large
wooden block. The vegetables are all large and solid and tactile. Most of
all, the substantial block of the woman, with the thickly layered paint of her
apron, conveys permanence, ¿ xedness. It is Chardin’s still life paintings that
command the highest critical respect, as we see here with Jar of Olives (1760).
Denis Diderot, the famous editor of the Enlightenment’s Encyclopedia, wrote
of this painting that its “magic de¿ es understanding.”
We see another Chardin still life, Glass of Water and Coffee Pot (c. 1761).
Compared with the Jar of Olives, this still life is rigorously edited, reduced
to a few perfectly selected and contrasted objects. The silvery glass of water
is balanced with the brown coffee pot, and the two are joined by the white
and green garlic heads, whose leaves and stems overhang the table’s edge at
the right. None of these objects can be moved without irreparably damaging