Girl with Racket and Shuttlecock

In 1737 the Paris Salon opened again after years of not being held, and Jean-Simeon Chardin sent this small painting of a girl pausing her game. She holds a battledore and shuttlecock, an early form of the game that later became badminton, and a pair of scissors and a pincushion hang at her waist, so she has stepped away from her sewing to play. Chardin showed it as a companion to a picture of a boy building a house of cards. He took the ordinary quiet of a middle-class household, a child absorbed in a small thing, and painted it with the care others saved for history and myth. The canvas entered the Uffizi in 1951.