Soap Bubbles

Although he was a member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture throughout his professional life, Chardin did not study at the Académie and had little if any traditional academic training in drawing from a model. He did not make preparatory studies for his canvases, upon which, according to contemporary reports, he worked slowly and with effort. His early still lifes include mostly inanimate objects: vegetables and fruit, dead game, hunting equipment, tableware, and kitchenware.

According to the dealer and collector Pierre-Jean Mariette, writing some fifteen years after the fact, Chardin’s first figural picture showed a head of a young man blowing bubbles and was studied from a model. Eighteenth-century French taste for Dutch art of the seventeenth century, in which soap bubbles and other intimations of mortality abound, may have influenced Chardin’s choice. In 1739, Chardin exhibited a version of Soap Bubbles at the Paris Salon, but we can't be sure if that was the version we present today.

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