Grapes and Pomegranates

Chardin's 'Grapes and Pomegranates' of 1763, in the Louvre, demonstrates the painter's sustained ability in his seventh decade to find compositional vitality in arrangements of fruit that he had been painting for nearly forty years. The pomegranate — with its distinctive crown and, when cut, its dense interior of jewel-like seeds — offered a surface character distinct from any of the more commonly depicted fruits, and Chardin exploits its unusual form as a focal accent within the arrangement. Late fruit paintings of this kind have been understood by critics as evidence that Chardin's eye never dulled even as his hand's precision loosened: the selection of objects and their placement remains as intelligent as ever, while the handling grows freer and more gestural. The Louvre's collection of late Chardin still lifes allows the evolution of his style to be traced through comparison across a single institution.

The pomegranate's crown and mottled skin are rendered with a rougher, more varied application than the smoother grape clusters. Grapes — individually spherical but grouped in organic clusters — receive small, rounded marks of colour that must simultaneously describe individual berries and the coherent mass of a bunch. The composition's tonal organisation is warm throughout, with individual objects differentiated through subtle chromatic rather than tonal contrast.