Portrait of Auguste Gabriel Godefroy

Chardin's 1741 portrait of Auguste Gabriel Godefroy, held at the São Paulo Museum of Art, depicts the same boy as the earlier 'enfant au toton' (spinning top) painting, now aged and perhaps somewhat more formally posed — suggesting this version was intended as a more conventional portrait record rather than a pure genre study. The São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), founded in 1947, has assembled one of the finest collections of European old masters in Latin America, and the Chardin is among its most distinguished French eighteenth-century holdings. The portrait's dual status — simultaneously genre scene and individual likeness — reflects Chardin's characteristic ability to inhabit multiple pictorial categories simultaneously without resolving the tension between them.

As a more formal portrait than the spinning-top version, this composition likely places greater emphasis on the sitter's face and clothing as indices of identity. Chardin renders the boy's features with careful tonal modelling, giving skin its characteristic luminosity through layered warm and cool passages. The setting — whatever domestic or architectural context Chardin provided — would have been subordinated to the figure while still maintaining the painter's commitment to material specificity.