The Hard-working Mother

On 27 November 1740 Philibert Orry, the controller-general of finances, who also ran the king's buildings, brought Chardin to Versailles to present two small canvases to Louis XV, this one and Saying Grace. The Mercure de France, the Paris monthly that reported on the court and the arts, wrote that the king received them very favourably, and that both were already well known because they had been shown at the Salon in the Louvre that August.

A mother sits with a piece of tapestry work across her lap and goes over it with her daughter, who stands beside her and looks down at the stitches. A winder with a skein of pink wool stands at the right, a workbox stuck with pins sits on the floor and a small dog lies beside it. The picture has stayed in the royal and then the national collections ever since, though it moved about. In 1823 it was recorded in the home of Alphonse de Cailleux, the director of the royal museums, and between 1830 and 1832 it was lent to the school at Saint-Denis that Napoleon had founded for the daughters of members of the Legion of Honour.