Still Life with Game
Jean Siméon Chardinprobably 1750s
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Washington, DC, United States
Chardin presents the bounty of a successful hunt with brute realism and immediacy. The bold brushstrokes convey the hares’ soft fur, the sticky, congealed blood, and the pheasant’s prickly feathers. Critics in the 1700s marveled at the way Chardin could use paint to capture not only how things appear but also their weight and physical presence. Unlike many artists of his time, Chardin does not show the animals ready to be cooked or displayed on expensive platters as tokens of wealth and status. They seem to exist in a placeless world, out of time. Chardin’s painting confronts us with the basic facts of life — and death.
- Title: Still Life with Game
- Creator: Jean Siméon Chardin
- Date Created: probably 1750s
- Physical Dimensions: overall: 49.6 x 59.4 cm (19 1/2 x 23 3/8 in.) framed: 72.2 x 82.1 x 8.3 cm (28 7/16 x 32 5/16 x 3 1/4 in.)
- Provenance: Possibly (Wildenstein & Co., Paris, New York, and London);[1] David David-Weill [1871-1952], Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, by 1925;[2] purchased February/March 1937 with the David-Weill collection by (Wildenstein & Co., Paris, New York, and London);[3] sold 1946 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[4] gift 1952 to NGA. [1] Eisler 1977: 314 indicates that David-Weill acquired the painting from Wildenstein, whose Paris office no longer has records to confirm this transaction (see letter from Ay-Whang Hsia to David Rust, 8 August 1978, in NGA curatorial files). [2] The painting appears in the background of a portrait of David-Weill painted by Edouard Vuillard in 1925, and was catalogued in the David-Weill collection by Georges Henriot in 1926. [3] "Sale of the David-Weill Collection." _Art News_ 35 (27 February 1937): 12 and "David-Weill Pictures Come to New York." _Art Digest_ 12 (1 November 1937): 13. David-Weill, head of Lazard Frère Bank and Chairman of the Conseil des Musées de France, had an extraordinary collection of art which was dispersed in several ways during the World War II era. Some of the collection was consigned to Wildenstein's in London, who in turn sent some of the paintings, including this Chardin, to their New York branch where they were exhibited in 1937. Despite complications of nationality during the war, David-Weill managed to ship a large part of the collection via Lisbon to New York. Unfortunately another portion of the collection, which had been safeguarded in Sourches by French museum administration officials, was confiscated by the Nazis in July 1941. Much of the collection was recovered and processed through the Munich Central Collecting Point after the war by the Allies. [4] See The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/2017.
- Rights: CC0
- Medium: oil on canvas
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