Still Life with Fish, Vegetables, Gougres, Pots, and Cruets on a Table

Two mackerels hang vertically against a plain background, suspended above the food laid out on the tabletop below — leafy greens, root vegetables, a wheel of cheese and covered bowls — in an arrangement at once spare and dynamic, lit so that the gleaming fish draw the eye. “Nobody has a greater understanding of the harmony of color and reflections,” wrote Diderot of Chardin: “what you grind on your palette is not this color or that… but the very substance of things.” Late in his career, when the still life was dismissed as a lowly genre, Chardin still transformed a simple kitchen scene into a meditation on light and paint — a subtle palette, an unshowy composition and brushwork of extraordinary delicacy. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.