Nature morte à la raie et au panier d'oignons

A skate and a basket of onions compose this early still life from 1731 at the Musée Angladon in Avignon. The skate, or ray fish, was the subject of Chardin's most famous early painting — La Raie (The Ray) — in which the gutted fish displays its viscera with a quality of uncanny presence that struck even early viewers as almost grotesque in its fleshy immediacy. This later skate composition connects to that founding work, demonstrating his continued interest in the fish's particular visual qualities: translucent flesh, complex texture, the contrast between the fish's disturbing internal organization and the mundane onions accompanying it. The Musée Angladon in Avignon preserves an important collection of French eighteenth-century works outside the major Parisian institutions.

The ray's distinctive form creates a composition of unusual visual interest, its flat, glistening surface contrasting with the rounded onions and the woven basket. Chardin renders the fish's translucent flesh and the onions' papery skins with his characteristic sensitivity to surface quality. The palette is dominated by the cool tones of the fish and the warm browns of the onions.