Fruit, Jug, and a Glass
Jean Siméon Chardin·c. 1726/1728
Historical Context
Chardin's Fruit, Jug, and a Glass from around 1726-28 is one of his early still lifes establishing his reputation as the finest practitioner of the genre in France. Chardin came to still life painting through the tradition of Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century painting, absorbing the Dutch emphasis on humble objects — the single fruit, the simple jug, the wine glass — rendered with close observational precision. His innovation was to combine this Dutch observational tradition with a French painterly freedom — building his surfaces with small, varied brushstrokes that captured light's behavior on different materials while creating a pictorial surface of exceptional richness. The result was still life painting of a new quality: simultaneously true and beautiful.
Technical Analysis
Chardin's technique is already remarkably assured, with each object rendered through carefully observed tonal relationships. The jug's matte ceramic surface, the glass's transparency, and the fruit's organic textures are differentiated through subtle variations in brushwork and color. The warm, muted palette creates unity while allowing each object its individual material truth.
Provenance
Marquis de Biron, Paris and Château de Biron, Monpazier;[1] sold 1926 to (Wildenstein & Co., Inc., Paris, New York, and London); sold 19 November 1927 or 1929 to Chester Dale [1883-1962], New York;[2] gift 1943 to NGA. [1] This "marquis de Biron" was possibly Guillaume de Gontaut Biron, marquis de Biron (1859-1939); see _Les donateurs du Louvre_, Paris, 1989: 220, and Georges Martin, _Histoire et généalogie des maisons de Gontaut Biron et D'Hautefort_, Lyon, 1995: 60. However, in a letter dated 3 December 1995 (in NGA curatorial files), the then-marquis de Gontaut-Biron says there is no family record or memory of paintings by Chardin in his ancestor's collection and gives a death date of 1936. [2] The Chester Dale records (copy in NGA curatorial files) give 1927 as the year of purchase. Joseph Baillio of Wildenstein, in a letter of 8 November 1995 to Eik Kahng (in NGA curatorial files), gives the year as 1929, and also provides the year that Wildenstein acquired the painting.
