The Copper Drinking Fountain

Chardin’s Copper Drinking Fountain is of radical freshness and offers a strikingly different view of unimportant everyday objects previously and for the most part still overlooked. In its compositionally significant position on the central axis of the picture, the copper urn is the main attraction of the quiet scene and its central motif. What may at first sight seem to be a random detail extracted from a larger context is in fact a composition as calculated as it is convincing. The modern connoisseur of this painting will not be looking through indifferent eyes at a piece of hydraulic equipment. The ravishing painterly execution relegates the subject of the picture firmly into the background: what remains in the memory are atmospheric values.