Le Buffet

In September 1728 Chardin, then not yet 30 and largely unknown, carried a few canvases into the Royal Academy of Painting in Paris. The Academy prized grand history painting above all, and still life sat near the bottom of its ranking of worthy subjects. Even so, on the strength of two of them, this buffet and a hanging skate, its members admitted him the same day, waiving the usual wait. The picture is a piled-up sideboard, fruit and silver and glass stacked into a loose pyramid, with a dog stretching up on the left toward the food. He was received, in the Academy's own register, as a painter of animals and fruit, the modest category these two canvases fit.