The Copper Cistern

Chardin's 'The Copper Cistern' of 1733, painted on panel and held in the Louvre, is one of his most celebrated small domestic works, measuring less than thirty centimetres on a side yet achieving a sense of physical presence and weight far beyond its dimensions. The copper cistern — a large vessel used to store water in the kitchen — is here depicted alone, without figure or narrative context, in a painting that amounts to a pure investigation of how light falls on a complex curved metal surface. The Louvre's holding of this work gives it canonical status in the French national collection, and it has been frequently cited by modernist critics as an anticipation of the kind of concentrated formal attention associated with Cézanne's still lifes. The panel support, unusual in Chardin's work, gives the surface a particularly smooth, dense quality.

The cistern's copper surface is built up through a sophisticated system of warm and cool glazes, with the characteristic orange-brown base of copper modulated by pale reflections from the surrounding environment. Chardin places a single bright highlight on the cistern's shoulder to establish the light source, then allows the surface to pass gradually into cooler, shadowed passages. The tap or spigot at the base is rendered with precise mechanical clarity.