Portrait of the Painter Joseph Aved ('The Alchemist')

Chardin signed this canvas and dated it to the day, 4 December 1734. The man at the table, reading a heavy book, is his friend Joseph Aved, a portrait painter, and the picture was made for the diplomat Count Rothenburg, one of Chardin's first patrons. When the count died, it came back to the painter.

What followed was a run of new names for the same face. At the Salon of 1737 Chardin showed it as A Chemist in His Laboratory. When François-Bernard Lépicié engraved it in 1745, the print called the sitter a souffleur, a man who blows on his furnace in search of the philosopher's stone, and The Alchemist has clung to it ever since. At the Salon of 1753 it was back as A Philosopher Occupied with His Reading. By then it belonged to the architect Pierre Biscry, who owned ten Chardins when he died. It reached the Louvre in 1915 with the bequest of Paul Bureau.