Still Life with a Rib of Beef

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin devoted his artistic career to still life and genre paintings, the former most often incorporating humble kitchen objects, far removed in spirit from the works of many of his contemporaries in mid- eighteenth-century France such as François Boucher, Carle van Loo, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard . Admitted to the French Royal Academy in 1728 as "a painter skilled in animals and fruits," Chardin rose to positions of importance, all the while painting subjects quite different from the more typical scenes of history and mythology, or portraits of courtiers. With a muted palette and realistic style purely his own, Chardin's paintings recall the small-scale Dutch cabinet paintings that were widely collected in France in the eighteenth century.

Still Life with a Rib of Beef displays a glazed stoneware jug with lid and a pot with a ladle or skimmer, accompanied by a copper cauldron, white cloth, and onions and leeks on a stone ledge, with a joint of meat hanging above-emblematic elements of Chardin's production in the 1730s. These objects were used and reused by the artist in numerous works, often with subtle variations, and are a testament to his careful observation of ordinary utensils and foods. Rendering the varying textures of each individual object obviously appealed to Chardin, and his painted surfaces are often thick and without glazes. He painted slowly and deliberately, with small strokes of colors applied side by side as opposed to being mixed together. The tones come together in the viewer's eye, and even his colored shadows seem to vibrate with light and atmosphere. Modest in both size and subject, Chardin's paintings and the objects they depict speak for themselves, proclaiming not grandiosity but rather a solid, middle-class order and harmony.