Domestic Pleasures

A woman sits alone in a quiet interior among the ordinary objects of a household, reading, and the picture keeps her in the middle of a calm deliberation rather than an action. The canvas began as a direct commission for Crown Princess Lovisa Ulrika of Sweden, negotiated through her agent Carl Gustaf Tessin, but Chardin chose the subject himself and showed the finished work at the Paris Salon of 1747. It came to Sweden with the royal collections, was inventoried there in 1760 and transferred from the Royal Museum to the museum in 1866, and has been admired ever since for the precision of its everyday setting. Jean Siméon Chardin was the great painter of that quiet register of the French eighteenth century: where Boucher filled his canvases with bright mythological invention, Chardin built his out of tables, copper and people absorbed in what they are doing, in a muted palette that gives the ordinary the weight of monument. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.