La Raie

1728

Oil on canvas, 45 × 57 1/2 in. Musée du Louvre, Paris

A kitchen table won its painter a place in the Academy: still life, painted well enough to serve as a reception piece.

Look at

The gutted ray hangs at the centre, its red flesh and pale skin one of two big light shapes, with the white cloth, against a brown stone wall.
The table is one long horizontal; the ray's point, the cat at left and the dark jug at right make a broad triangle on it.
Paint is thick and dragged in the flesh and the white cloth, thin and scumbled on the wall.

Kept by the Academy until the Revolution, then seized and hung in the Louvre from June 1796.
Shown again in the Chardin retrospectives of 1979 and 1999.

Image: Musée du Louvre · Public domain (faithful reproduction of a public-domain 2D work)