Still Life with Game

An orange, a pheasant, and two hares lie on a brown ledge that spans the canvas, the bird’s sapphire head drooping over the edge and a drop of dark blood at the lower rabbit’s mouth, each body rendered with the bold, loaded brushwork that made Chardin the most admired still-life painter of eighteenth-century France. He painted the picture in the 1750s, and critics marvelled at how the paint conveyed not only how the game looked but its weight and physical presence — the hares’ soft fur, the pheasant’s prickly feathers — without the platters and silver of the aristocratic hunt picture. The canvas belonged to the great Parisian collector David David-Weill by 1925, appeared in the background of a Vuillard portrait of him that year, and came to the National Gallery of Art in 1952 with the Samuel H. Kress Collection. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.