The Silver Cup

The old title of this little picture reads like an inventory. Three api apples, two chestnuts, a bowl and a silver goblet. The api was a small French apple, and Chardin added nothing else. He painted it around 1768, when he was nearly 70 and had been painting kitchen things for some 40 years. A silver goblet of this kind turns up in his still lifes as early as the late 1720s, and here it returns on a canvas only 41 centimetres wide. Its companion, pears, walnuts and a glass of wine on a canvas of exactly the same size, is also in the Louvre.