Pears, Walnuts and Glass of Wine

Chardin's 'Pears, Walnuts and Glass of Wine' of 1768, now in the Louvre, belongs to his very late production and demonstrates the particular spareness of his final years of oil painting. By 1768 Chardin was in his late sixties and had begun transitioning to pastel for his portrait work; his oil still lifes of this period often feature a very small number of objects arranged with almost meditative restraint. The glass of wine — its contents catching and transmitting light — was a perennial challenge in still-life painting, demanding the painter describe a liquid's colour, the glass's refraction, and the modification of both by reflected ambient light. Walnuts and pears provide contrasting surface textures — the rough, crenellated walnut shell and the smooth, faintly blushes pear skin — that Chardin handles with the assured economy of long practice.

The wine glass is rendered with great economy: a few carefully placed strokes establish the refraction and colour of the liquid, the transparency of the glass, and the highlight on its rim. Chardin avoids the over-worked illusionism of earlier Dutch glass painting, preferring an impression of optical truth to a detailed inventory of reflective phenomena. The walnuts are treated with a rough, dry paint surface; the pears with smooth, graduated tonal modelling.