Musical Instruments and Basket of Fruit

Painted as a companion piece to 'Musical Instruments and Parrot' in 1732, this trophy composition replaces the parrot with a basket of fruit, creating a pairing that would have served a decorative programme in a music room or salon. The combination of musical instruments and fruit belonged to a long emblematic tradition associating music with the pleasures of taste and smell — the harmonious senses. Chardin's version is characteristically empirical rather than allegorical: there are no personifications or symbolic apparatus, only objects arranged with the painter's habitual intelligence. The two companion works demonstrate Chardin's command of the trophy format, an explicitly decorative mode that he nonetheless managed to infuse with the same focused observation that distinguished his cabinet pictures. Both works currently lack confirmed institutional locations.

The basket of fruit introduces organic, rounded forms into a composition otherwise dominated by the angular geometry of instrument bodies and bows. Chardin uses the colour of the fruit — warm yellows, reds, and dusty greens — to create a warm focus at one end of the composition, balancing the cooler tones of the instrument surfaces. The wicker basket's texture is suggested with characteristic economy of means.