Pears, Walnuts and Glass of Wine

Chardin did not date this canvas, and the Louvre places it around 1768, the year he signed the basket of peaches, which has the same tumbler of red wine and the same broken walnuts on a canvas of almost the same size. He painted it, though, as the companion of a different picture, The Silver Cup, also in the Louvre and made to exactly the same measurements. In that one the light falls on a silver goblet, three small apples, two chestnuts and a bowl. Here it falls on a glass of wine, three green pears, two of them standing with their stalks up, a cracked walnut and a knife pointing in from the right.

Nobody has traced the picture's owners in the 18th century. It surfaced in the collection of Louis La Caze, a Paris doctor who bought French paintings of the previous century while they were cheap and out of fashion, perhaps in 1862, and it came to the Louvre with his bequest in 1869.