Still Life with a Jar of Olives

At the Salon of 1763 Diderot stopped in front of this canvas and wrote some of his best-known lines about Chardin. He listed what he saw, a vase of old Chinese porcelain, two biscuits, a jar of olives, a basket of fruit, two glasses half full of wine, a bitter orange and a pâté. The porcelain, he wrote, is porcelain, and the water the olives float in does stand between them and the eye. If he meant his child to become a painter, this is the picture he would buy, and he would tell the child to copy it, and copy it again.

Chardin had signed and dated the canvas in 1760, three years before the exhibition, and at almost a metre across it is far larger than the small fruit pieces he painted in these years. When Diderot saw it, it very probably already belonged to the abbé Pommyer, a churchman who collected pictures. The pâté in its crust, which Diderot said one need only cut into, sits at the left beside a knife.