A Bowl of Plums

Chardin's 'A Bowl of Plums' of 1728, at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., is one of his earliest still-life works to survive in major collection, dating from the same year as his Académie reception pieces. The Phillips Collection, founded by Duncan Phillips in 1921 and known for its emphasis on the relationship between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, acquired the Chardin as part of a broader argument about the continuity of painterly values across periods — a continuity Phillips saw running from Chardin through to Cézanne and the Impressionists. A bowl of plums — simple, domestic, without allegorical or social pretension — represents Chardin's programme in miniature: the assertion that serious pictorial attention could be sustained by the humblest subject.

The bowl is a simple ceramic form, rendered with the cool, restrained tonal modelling Chardin applied to earthenware throughout his career. The plums within — round, dark, with their characteristic dusty bloom — are each individually modelled through the dry-scumble-over-warm-base technique he developed for stone fruits. The bowl's rim and interior provide a spatial container that organises the individual plums into a collective, coherent form.