Still Life

Kitchen vessels and food compose this still life from around 1750 at the Burrell Collection in Glasgow. Sir William Burrell's eclectic collection, assembled over a lifetime of dedicated connoisseurship from the 1880s until his death in 1958, included significant French eighteenth-century paintings alongside medieval tapestries and Chinese bronzes. The Burrell Collection's Chardin represents the bourgeois Glaswegian collecting taste that saw in French eighteenth-century painting a standard of civilized domestic refinement. Chardin's kitchen still lifes appealed to collectors across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries precisely because their subject matter — humble, everyday, unpretentious — seemed to transcend the period fashions that made other Rococo works appear dated.

Chardin's mature still-life technique achieves a balance of precise observation and atmospheric unity that gives humble objects a quiet grandeur. The varied surfaces—ceramic, metal, food—are differentiated with his characteristic sensitivity while being unified by the ambient light of the domestic setting. The palette is warm and restrained, colors muted to the actual appearance of the objects.