La raya

Chardin painted a gutted ray hanging in a kitchen in the 1720s, the canvas that got him into the French Academy, and it has hung in the Louvre since the Revolution. Soutine went to look at it, repeatedly. He was 29, from a village near Minsk, living in Montparnasse on almost nothing, and in the winter of 1922 an American collector called Albert Barnes came to his dealer's rooms and bought more than 50 of his canvases in one visit. The prices asked for his work jumped immediately, and this ray comes from the year after that. Soutine took Chardin's subject rather than his handling, the split fish strung up over a table, and returned to it several times in the mid-1920s. The canvas belongs to the museum at Orleans and is shown at Chartres.