The Serinette

This is probably the picture Chardin painted to order in 1751 for Charles Le Normant de Tournehem, director of the king's buildings, whose nephew had married Madame de Pompadour. The commission went through the king's first painter, Charles-Antoine Coypel, and at the Salon later that year the canvas was shown as A Lady Varying Her Amusements. Tournehem died that November, and by 1753 the picture belonged to Pompadour's brother, the marquis de Vandières, who had taken over his post.

A woman in a white dress sits by a window turning the handle of a serinette, a small barrel organ used to teach caged birds a tune, and the bird waits in its cage beside her. In 1753 the engraver Laurent Cars published a print of the composition. Chardin also painted a second version, which is now in the Frick Collection in New York.