Soap Bubbles

At the stone window of a plain house a boy in a mauve jacket leans on the sill and blows through a straw into a translucent soap bubble that hangs just below, while beside him a younger child in a cap peers over the ledge to watch, a glass of soapy water standing at the boy’s elbow. Jean-Siméon Chardin painted the little picture around 1733–1734, and the theme — the fragility of a soap bubble, “vanitas vanitatum” in the old emblem books — is treated not as a lesson but as a moment of absorbed play, rendered with his unmatched sympathy for quiet domestic life and the plain things around it. The vine leaves that drape the window soften the almost severe composition, and the light falls gently on the boy’s cheek, his ruffled cuff and the iridescent bubble. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.