The White Tablecloth
Jean Siméon Chardin (French, 1699–1779)
c. 1731–32
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 96.8 × 123.5 cm (38 1/8 × 48 5/16 in.); Framed: 126.7 × 154.4 × 14 cm (49 7/8 × 60 3/4 × 5 1/2 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Jean Siméon Chardin won acclaim for the still lifes and quiet scenes of middle-class domestic life that he exhibited at salons sponsored by the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In early still lifes like this one, he incorporated motifs common to 17th-century Dutch and Flemish works: the foreshortened knife, the handle of which protrudes over the table’s edge; the overturned glass; and the remains of a meal. The work’s unusual shape reveals its original function as a screen for the opening of a fireplace. Viewed at floor level, the screen would have conveyed the illusion of a table recessed into the fireplace.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
