North Carolina Museum of Art

Parisian still life collectors were unaccustomed to the ordinariness of the objects in Chardin's kitchen scenes. Contemporaries such as Oudry (also in the Museum's collection) preferred more luxurious depictions of game animals in their still lifes. There were, however, precedents for Chardin's quotidien subjects in Flemish and Dutch pictures, and there were enough French collectors who admired Chardin's skill to sustain his career. Intimate groupings of kitchen utensils and game were a new subject for Chardin about 1730. In 1628 he had been received as a member of the prestigious Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture on the acceptance of a presentation piece, now in the Louvre, that also features a ray fish but with much larger dimensions. While the ceramic jug, copper pot, and mortar and pestle were common in middle class households of the eighteenth century, Chardin did not include them randomly. He selected objects appealing to his sense of material surfaces and his preference for curving shapes. His compositions were equally careful; several of these small pictures were repeated almost exactly. The Museum's painting is the earliest and best of about a half-dozen known versions. Such pictures and later scenes of daily life that continued to utilize precisely positioned household objects as compositional elements made Chardin the finest still life painter of France.