Young Man with a Violin (Charles-Théodose Godefroy)

The young man is Charles-Théodose Godefroy, born in 1718, the eldest son of Charles Godefroy, a Paris jeweller and banker. Chardin painted him in 1734 or 1735, when he was 16 or 17, holding his violin and bow and turning away from the music on its stand to look out of the picture. The father very probably ordered the portrait, and it stayed with the family's descendants until 1907, when the Louvre bought it with income from a bequest left by Léon Dru.

The canvas itself has been reshaped. At some point it was adapted to hang as the companion of Chardin's slightly later portrait of the sitter's younger brother, the boy watching his spinning top, which is also in the Louvre. To match the two, strips were cut from the top and the right-hand side of this canvas and added along the bottom and the left.