La Fille de cuisine

Chardin painted this in 1738, in a Paris where the fashionable taste ran to Boucher's pink goddesses and mythological romps for the court. Chardin went the other way and stayed with the kitchen. A young servant has paused over her work, a knife and half-peeled turnips in her lap, pots and a butcher's block on the floor around her. On that block sits a cleaver with a small smear of blood, a quiet reminder of the labour going on inside all the stillness. Pictures like this made his name at the Salon, where crowds who could not afford grand history paintings recognised their own households. He thought well enough of the maid to paint the composition four separate times.