Water Glass and Jug

Diderot could have no higher praise of a Chardin still-life than to say: ‘C’est la nature même.’ And for him Chardin remained the great magician-painter whose canvases deceived the eye by their tremendous realism, down to the very textures of the objects painted. Such pictures kept the spectator completely within his own experience, and to some extent that is true of all the pictures painted by Chardin - including those genre scenes which were executed chiefly in the years before Diderot wrote of the Salons, but which are also in their way still-lives. Neither category of picture was novel, and Chardin might seem merely to be practicing what had been among the most typical products of Dutch seventeenth-century painting.