Basket of Grapes, Silver Goblet and Bottle

The Louvre can only say that Chardin painted this before 1728, which puts it among his early still lifes. A wicker basket is heaped with white and black grapes and a couple of peaches, and on the stone ledge in front stand a silver goblet and a dark glass bottle, with two plums, another peach and a pear. The picture's history runs through a friendship. It very probably belonged to Joseph Aved, a portrait painter and one of Chardin's closest friends, and it appears as lot 129 in the sale held after Aved's death in November 1766, while Chardin was still at work. The two men meet again elsewhere in the Louvre. In 1734 Chardin painted Aved as a man reading at a table, the picture later known as Le Souffleur. Here the name Chardin is signed at the lower left, along the edge of the ledge.