Dead Rabbit with Hunting Gear

Under Louis XV, game like this was a privilege. The right to hunt belonged to nobles and to the lords of the land, and a peasant who killed a rabbit eating his crops could be prosecuted as a poacher. The old title of this canvas calls the animal a lapin de garenne, a rabbit from a warren, and warrens were themselves a lord's right. Chardin hung it head down on a stone ledge, beside a hunter's game bag and powder flask, and signed his name at the lower left.

Some 60 years later, in August 1789, the revolutionary National Assembly set about dismantling feudal privilege, and one article of its decrees abolished, in a single sentence, the exclusive right to hunt and open warrens. By then the picture had probably passed through several Paris sales, one of them after the death of the bronze chaser Philippe Caffieri. In 1852 the Louvre bought it from the painter Jules Boilly for 700 francs.