Among the works exhibited by Chardin at the Paris Salon of 1737 was a painting of ‘a girl drawing water from a cistern’ and another of ‘a serving woman doing the washing.’ Known respectively as La Fontaine (The Water Cistern) and La Blanchisseuse  (The Washerwoman), they were among his earliest genre pictures. Chardin is said to have been provoked to paint them by his friend, the portraitist Aved, who reportedly remarked that, ‘You imagine that [painting portraits] is as easy as painting cakes and sausages.’

The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm has versions of both paintings, which were probably the first ones Chardin painted of these subjects -- the Stockholm La Fontaine is signed and dated 1733 -- and both were subsequently engraved by Charles-Nicolas Cochin in 1739. The two pictures were perhaps intended to be pendants, but it is impossible to be certain, not least because La Fontaine is painted on wood and La Blanchisseuse on canvas. However, in part because of their similar subjects, they have often been viewed and exhibited as a pair since they were hung together at the Salon of 1737.

The National Gallery’s version is most likely a replica painted by Chardin, who may have been prompted to make a copy of the painting after the original had been bought and exported to Sweden after the death in 1744 of its first owner, the collector Antoine de la Roque. However, it may have been painted earlier than this. It is a very close copy of the Stockholm picture but appears to have been quite rapidly painted, and with a greater contrast of light and dark, so it may have been made specifically for Cochin to use for his 1739 engraving.

We are looking here at a scullery with a cobbled floor in what is most likely a bourgeois home in Paris. A maid, her face partially hidden by her linen bonnet, draws water from a large copper cistern, her left arm pulled taut by the weight of the jug. The relative darkness of the room emphasises the reflected highlights of the cistern, jug and bucket handle, whose bright gleams contrast with the textures, softer tones and warmer colours that are used elsewhere and which bind the composition together -- for example, the warm red of the joint of meat reflected on the copper urn. As the maid bends forward, her straight back leads us to an open doorway on the right through which we can see another woman talking to a young child, who stands before yet another door. The second servant also wears a white bonnet and her pose almost mirrors that of the woman filling the jug.

The device of a view through an open doorway to the side of the picture was often used by Dutch and Flemish artists, such as Teniers, Dou and Kalf, whose work Chardin may have known from French collections or from engravings. But Chardin’s picture is a still life as well as a scene of domestic life. In contrast to the human presence on the right, the left-hand side of the picture is filled with household objects that include a set of copper pans, a barrel and logs for the hearth. Full of detailed observation, the painting offers us a glimpse of servants’ lives ‘below stairs’, which were very different from those of the wealthy collectors who bought Chardin's pictures.

Style: Rococo