Still Life with Kitchen Utensils and Vegetables

Chardin's 'Still Life with Kitchen Utensils and Vegetables' of 1734, at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, belongs to the productive middle period of the 1730s when he was consolidating his approach to the kitchen still life and building a substantial body of work in this mode. The combination of kitchen utensils and vegetables brings together the two principal categories of object that occupied him in these years — the tools of cooking and the provisions that those tools would prepare. Vegetables — onions, cabbages, root vegetables — provided Chardin with organic forms of varying surface quality: smooth, rough, leafy, papery — a range of pictorial challenges within a single picture. The Nationalmuseum's group of Chardin genre and still-life paintings from this period is among the most important outside France.

The composition deploys the standard Chardin strategy for kitchen still lifes: objects on a shallow ledge at roughly eye level, lit from one side, with the arrangement balanced between hard-edged utensils and the looser, more organic forms of the vegetables. Ceramic and metal utensils are rendered with cool precision; the vegetables receive a warmer, softer application that reflects their organic irregularity.