Godefroy, and is the companion picture to the "Young Man with the Violin," which represents the child's elder brother Charles. The two pictures were bought in 1907 for the Louvre, at the high price of 350,000 francs. "L'Enfant au Toton" was first exhibited at the Salon of 1738, and was engraved by Lépicié in 1742. A replica of the picture was in the collection of the late M. Groult. It is one of Chardin's most delightful presentments of innocent childish amusement, and illustrates at the same time the master's supreme skill in the painting of still-life.

Chardin's still-life pictures never appear to be grouped to form balanced arrangements of line and colour. The manner how the objects are seen in the accidental position in which they were left by the hands that used them holds more than a suggestion of genre painting. Indeed, it may be said that all Chardin's still-life partakes of genre as much as his genre partakes of still-life. A loaf of bread, a knife, and a black bottle on a crumpled piece of paper; a basket, a few eggs, and a copper pot, and such like material, suffice for him to create so vivid a picture of simple home life, that only the presence of the housewife or serving-maid is needed to raise the painting into the sphere of domestic genre. Sometimes this scarcely needed touch of actual life is given by the introduction of some domestic animal; and in these cases we already find a hint of that unity of conception which in Chardin's genre pieces links the living creature to the surrounding inanimate objects. Take the famous "Skate" at the Louvre. On a table you see an earthen pot, a saucepan, a kettle, and a knife, grouped in accidental disorder on a negligently spread white napkin on the right; on the left are some fish and oysters and leeks, and from the wall behind is suspended a huge skate. A cat is carefully feeling its way among the oyster-shells, deeply interested in the various victuals which it eyes with eager longing. Even more pronounced is this attitude of interest in Baron Henri de Rothschild's "Chat aux Aguets." Here a crouching cat, half puzzled, half excited, is seen in the extreme left corner, crouching in readiness to spring at a dead hare that is lying between a partridge and a magnificent silver tureen, and is obviously the object of the feline's hesitating attention.

It is this complete absorption of the protagonists of Chardin's genre scenes in their occupations or thoughts that fills his work with such profound human interest. Chardin is never anecdotal, never sentimental—in this respect, as well as in the solidity of his technique, and in his scientific search for colour values and atmosphere, he is vastly superior to Greuze, whose genre scenes are never free from literary flavour and from a certain kind of affectation. Nor does Chardin ever fancy himself in the rôle of the moralist like our own Hogarth, with whom he has otherwise so much in common. He looks upon his simple fellow-creatures with a sympathetic eye, watching them in the pursuit of their daily avocation, the women conscientiously following the routine of their housework or tenderly occupied with the education of their children, the children themselves intent upon work or play—never posing for artistic effect, but wholly oblivious of the painter's watching eye. Chardin was by no means the first of his country's masters to devote himself to contemporary life. Just as Oudry took the first hesitating steps towards the Chardinesque conception of still-life, so Jean Raoux busied himself in the closing days of the seventeenth century with creating records of scenes taken from the daily life of the people, but he never rid himself of the sugary affected manner that was the taste of his time. It was left to Chardin to introduce into the art of genre painting in France the sense of intimacy, the homogeneous vision, the atmosphere of reality which we find in such masterpieces as the "Grace before Meat," "The Reading Lesson," "The Governess," "The Convalescent's Meal," "The Card Castle," the "Récureuse," the "Pourvoyeuse," and the famous "Child with the Top," which, after having changed hands in 1845, at the time when Chardin was held in slight esteem, for less than £25, was recently bought for the Louvre, together with the companion portrait of Charles Godefroy, "The Young Man with the Violin," for the enormous price of £14,000.

In the case of each of these pictures the first thing that strikes your attention is the complete absorption of the personages in their occupation. In the picture of the boy building the card castle you can literally see him drawing in his breath for fear of upsetting the fragile structure which he is erecting. You imagine you can hear the sigh of relief with which the "Pourvoyeuse"—the woman returning from market—deposits her heavy load of bread on the dresser, whilst the sudden release of the weight that had been supported by her left arm seems to increase the strain on her right. How admirable is the expression of keen attention on the puckered brow of the child who in "The Reading Lesson" tries to follow with plump finger the line indicated by the school-mistress; or the solicitude of the governess who, whilst addressing some final words of advice or admonition to the neatly dressed boy about to depart for school, has just for the moment ceased brushing his three-cornered hat. There is no need to give further instances. In all Chardin's subject pictures he opens a door upon the home life of the simple bourgeoisie to which he himself belonged by birth and character, and allows you to watch from some safe hiding-place the doings of these good folk who are utterly unaware of your presence.

Having devoted his early years to still-life, and his prime to domestic genre, Chardin lived long enough to weary his public and critics, and to find himself in the position of a fallen favourite. But though his eyesight had become affected, and his hands had lost the sureness of their touch, so that he had practically to give up oil-painting, he entered in his last years upon a short career of glorious achievement in an entirely new sphere—he devoted himself to portraiture in pastel, and gained once more the enthusiastic applause of the people, even though the critics continued to exercise their severe and prejudiced judgment, and to blame him for that very verve and violence of technique which later received the Goncourt brothers' unstinted praise. "What surprising images. What violent and inspired work; what scrumbling and modelling; what rapid strokes and scratches!" His pastel portraits of himself and of his second wife, and his magnificent head of a jockey have the richness and plastic life of oil-paintings, and have indeed more boldness and virility than the work even of the most renowned of all French pastellists, La Tour. In view of their freshness and vigour, it is difficult to realise that they are the work of a suffering septuagenarian.

The mention of the hostility shown by Chardin's contemporary critics towards the system of juxtaposing touches of different colour in his pastels, opens up a very interesting question with regard to the master's technique of oil-painting and of the eighteenth-century critics' attitude towards it. There is no need to dwell upon the comment of a man like Mariette, who discovers in Chardin's paintings the signs of too much labour, and deplores the "heavy monotonous touch, the lack of ease in the brushwork, and the coldness of his work"—the "coldness" of the