Still Life with a White Mug

Three apples and two pears sit beside a luminous white mug and a knife on a stone table before a muted olive-green background, the fruit dappled with candy red and pale yellow, everything painted with soft, blended strokes that give the small canvas a glowing stillness. Jean Siméon Chardin, the most admired still-life painter of eighteenth-century France, made this picture about 1764, late in a career whose final still lifes grew ever quieter and more reduced, and it shows the mastery of paint — white highlights catching the mug, brick-red shadows on the stone — that made his name with collectors. The painting was recorded with the Baron de Saint-Julien in Paris in 1784, passed through the collection of the Swedish miniaturist Peter Adolf Hall, and was acquired in 1937 by W. Averell and Marie N. Harriman, whose foundation gave it to the National Gallery of Art in 1972 in memory of Marie. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.