Plate of Peaches

In 1860 a gallery on the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris put on a show of 18th-century French painting, and more than 40 of the pictures in it were by Jean-Siméon Chardin, the painter of quiet kitchen tables and fruit who had been out of fashion for decades. Collectors began buying him again, and at the end of 1863 the writers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt published a long, admiring essay on him. Fantin-Latour painted this in 1862, in the middle of that revival, and the Museum of Fine Arts sees Chardin's example in it. There are three peaches, a plate and a fruit knife, and nothing else on the table. The canvas is tiny, about 18 by 32 centimetres, and he wrote Fantin and the year in the upper left corner. It probably went from his studio to Gustave Tempelaere, a Paris dealer who worked closely with him, and the museum bought it in 1960.