Un lapin, deux grives mortes et quelques brins de paille sur une table de pierre

A dead rabbit, two dead thrushes, and wisps of straw lie on a stone table in this game still life from around 1750 at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris. The hunting museum provides an ideal institutional context for Chardin's game still lifes, which participated in a long tradition of depicting hunting trophies while transforming it through his painterly approach. The combination of rabbit — soft, domestic, abundant — with the smaller thrushes creates a compositional hierarchy of size and weight that Chardin manipulates with characteristic confidence. His stone table surfaces, rendered with the same rough attention as the game upon them, create the foundational plane against which the varied textures of fur and feather are set.

The combination of rabbit fur, thrush feathers, and straw creates a composition of contrasting textures that Chardin differentiates with characteristic precision. The stone table provides a neutral, cool surface against which the warm tones of the game animals stand out. The straw's pale, angular forms provide graphic interest amid the softer organic shapes of the dead animals.