La Fontaine (The Water Cistern)

Chardin's 'La Fontaine (The Water Cistern)' of 1733, at the National Gallery in London, is one of the finest examples of his domestic interior still life in a major British public collection. The National Gallery acquired the work as part of its effort to represent the breadth of European painting across all major schools and periods, and the Chardin is among its most important eighteenth-century French holdings. The work depicts the same type of large domestic water cistern as the Louvre's copper cistern of the same year, demonstrating how a single subject could sustain two distinct compositional investigations made in the same season. The National Gallery version emphasises the cistern's relationship to a domestic architectural setting, placing it within a room that implies its daily function.

The cistern is depicted in a domestic context that adds architectural elements — wall, floor, perhaps a adjacent shelf or door — to the composition, requiring Chardin to manage spatial depth more actively than in an isolated object study. The cistern's metallic surface is rendered with the warm glaze-over-ground technique he applied consistently to copper vessels, with precise highlight placement and careful shadow graduation. The architectural surround is painted with a similarly restrained, tonal approach.