Day 406 - 18th-century French painting outside the court

 March 20, 2025

Gallery 629 is home to a rather odd melange of early 18th century French paintings whose subjects include entertainers, military encampments, still lifes, and imagined scenes illustrating LaFontaine fables.  Truth to tell, I don't much care for most of these paintings, many of which feel more like sketches than finished works .The gallery  also contains musical instruments from the period - mostly stringed instruments, but also, an oboe and a beautifully curved hunting horn, as well as a hurdy-gurdy, which I've never seen before. The placement of these instruments here is apt, since musicians figure in a number of the paintings, and since a glass door leads from this room into the musical instrument galleries. 

One work that captures my attention is Jean Simeon Chardin's "Soap Bubbles," completed around 1733-1734.  In this rather small square painting, which measures about 32" by 32", a young man leans over the edge of a table blowing a soap bubble through a long thins tube. The palette is limited and dark: the young man wears a brown coat against a dark background. An unseen light illuminates the right side of his face and his hands and is reflected in the soap bubble.  Two aspects of the painting are especially arresting to me: the marvelously rounded and transparent bubble itself, and the fact that the young man seems to have payes! (No kipa, though.)

I know that students are sometimes enjoined to look at a painting for a full ten minutes before trying to comment on it. Maybe if I had done that, I would have noticed the young boy at the right of the painting who cranes his head above the table to watch the bubble-blower at work (or rather, at play); instead, I see the boy only when the caption mentions his presence.  (In fairness to myself, the boy's face is shrouded in darkness. )  But really, it's a testament to Chardin's skill that I gaze at the bubble as raptly as the young child.