Still Life with Herrings

A blue-banded earthenware pitcher stands among herrings, an onion and a cloth laid on a stone ledge, the whole modest larder observed with the patient gravity that made Jean-Siméon Chardin the master of the eighteenth-century still life. Painted about 1735, the picture turns humble kitchen fare into a study of tone and texture in which every brushstroke serves the fall of light across fish, pottery and linen. Quiet, balanced and unforced, it belongs to the quiet poetry that set Chardin apart from the gallantly patterned art of his time.