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. This, too, shall pass. . . . At Chardin's birth, with the invention of calculus, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhem von Leibniz were dissecting time. Chardin does it in paint.