Basket of plums

Plums fill a basket in this fruit still life from 1759 at the Museum of Fine Arts of Rennes. Chardin's fruit compositions, painted primarily in the 1750s and 1760s, represent a shift from the game and kitchen subjects of his earlier career to simpler, more concentrated studies of fruit, flowers, and household objects. The plums' bloom-covered surfaces offered Chardin a subject perfectly suited to his gift for rendering the ephemeral qualities of natural surfaces.

The plums' dusty bloom is rendered with extraordinary subtlety, the matte surface catching light differently from the shinier skin beneath. Chardin builds up the fruit's color through layered applications that create optical richness beyond what direct mixing could achieve. The basket provides textural contrast, its woven structure rendered with careful attention to the interplay of light and shadow within the weave.