The Silver Tureen

Chardin's 'The Silver Tureen' of 1730, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is one of his most imposing early still lifes, centring on a large silver tureen — a formal serving vessel associated with aristocratic and upper-bourgeois dining rather than the modest kitchen equipment that appears in most of his work. The Metropolitan Museum's French eighteenth-century holdings are among the finest in the world, and the Chardin is a centrepiece of that collection. The silver tureen's formal associations — it belongs to the world of banqueting silver and ceremonial dining — give this painting a somewhat different social register from Chardin's usual kitchen subjects, suggesting his ability to work across the full range of domestic material culture from humble earthenware to grand silver service. The addition of live game (a cat, a dog, game animals) to the tureen composition introduced the same animated tension he brought to his other kitchen still lifes.

The tureen's large silver surface provides an extended exercise in the rendering of cool, reflective metal in three dimensions. Chardin builds the surface through a complex system of cool grey and pale blue passages with precise reflected colour notes from any adjacent objects — the tureen summarises its environment in miniature. The vessel's scale — significantly larger than a cup or goblet — requires the painter to manage reflection phenomena across a much broader curved surface.