Basket of Peaches, with Walnuts, Knife and Glass of Wine

In the middle of the 19th century Chardin's pictures could still turn up in unlikely places, and Laurent Laperlier, one of the first collectors to go looking for them, owned this one by 1860. A story repeated in the Louvre's own records has him buying it for 20 francs from a laundress at the top of the rue des Martyrs, on the slope of Montmartre. The museum prefers a plainer version. Shortly after 1854 Laperlier bought it at the sale held after the death of an old architect, said to be a relative of Chardin, who had lived in squalor near the Porte Saint-Martin.

Chardin signed and dated the canvas in 1768 and showed it at the Salon of 1769, paired with a basket of grapes that was later destroyed. The peaches sit on a bed of leaves in a low basket, with a tumbler of red wine on the left, a knife jutting over the edge of the ledge and two walnuts, one of them cracked open. The same glass and the same walnuts return beside three pears on another small canvas of these years in the Louvre. When Laperlier's collection was sold in 1867, the museum bought this picture for 1,324 francs.