The Silver Tureen

Jean-Siméon Chardin’s The Silver Tureen, exhibited in 1728, arranges a polished silver tureen, a copper pot, and the remains of a hunt — a pheasant and other game — on a kitchen table. Painted with Chardin’s characteristic gravity and scrupulous attention to the play of light on metal and feather, the modest subject is ennobled into a quiet meditation on abundance and transience. It helped establish Chardin as the greatest still-life painter of the eighteenth century.