In one painting, a mirror even opens up new virtues, for it reflects a washerwoman, poor and without a trace of vanity. She is getting on with her work, not unlike a painter. Emblems that once opened out to eternity now stand for a more mundane sense of time. Chardin snatches a moment just before it disappears. Those candle flames die in an instant.
Smoke rises convincingly from a tea kettle, as palpable as the plain, wooden table beneath it.
The French speak of nature morte rather than still life, nature not just motionless but dead. For Chardin, nothing sits still. Smoke drifts away, and a very live cat pounces. Perhaps paintings do arrange the same pots and furniture year after year, but in the meantime the vegetables will have decayed. The bourgeois, with Chardin as their first great chronicler, will have bought and dressed new ones.