Basket of Peaches, with Walnuts, Knife and Glass of Wine

Peaches fill a basket while walnuts, a knife, and a glass of wine complete this still life from 1768 at the Louvre. By the late 1760s, Chardin's failing eyesight was forcing him toward increasingly simple compositions and eventually toward pastel, but his fruit still lifes from this period achieve an extraordinary concentrated intensity. Each painting seems to distill a lifetime of looking into a few humble objects arranged with supreme assurance.

The peaches' velvety surfaces are rendered with the layered technique Chardin had perfected over four decades, creating optical effects of extraordinary richness from apparently simple means. The knife's reflective blade, the glass's transparency, and the walnuts' rough shells each receive characteristically differentiated treatment. The palette is warm and concentrated, with the ripe peaches providing the chromatic focus.