The Silver Cup

Chardin's 'The Silver Cup' of 1768, in the Louvre, is among the last significant works of his oil-painting career — by the late 1760s he was increasingly moving to pastel for new works. The silver cup presented a refined challenge: silver's particular reflectivity, cooler and more neutral than copper or gold, required a different tonal strategy, relying on the subtle reflection of ambient colours rather than the warm glow of warmer metals. The Louvre's holding of this late work alongside earlier Chardin still lifes allows the full evolution of his approach to be traced through a single collection. A silver cup would have been a middle-register luxury object in eighteenth-century French domestic culture — above the copper and earthenware of the everyday kitchen but below the formal silver plate of grand dining.

Silver's cool neutrality is rendered through a palette of cool greys, pale blues, and near-whites, with warm notes only where the cup reflects adjacent objects. Chardin builds the reflective surface through carefully modulated tonal passages rather than bright highlights alone — the cup's volume is established through a gradual transition from lit to shadowed side. Any accompanying objects are chosen to provide colour notes that the silver's surface will then reflect.