Figure 22 Chardin himself was heir to a still-life tradition that he modified and made Willem Kalf his own: among other things, he took the aristocratic supper—with its huge, festive (Dutch, 1619-1693) cones of sweets and fruit—and whittled it down to size, so that, as in Chardin;s still Still Life with Ewer, Vessels, life in the Getty, we are left with a humble and diminutive pyramidal mass of peaches and Pomegranate, mid-i64os Oil on canvas, 103.5 x or plums (probably numbering five; one can count four and deduce a fifth in the 3 81.3 cm (40 /4 x 32 in.) back to hold up the pyramid), sitting next to a plain pewter flagon, three walnuts, one Los Angeles, j. Paul of them shelled, and a couple of sprigs of grapes, one green and one purple, with a Getty Museum 54.PA.1 stray murky green pearl of a grape in the center, all disposed on an uneven stone Figure 23 shelf, plainest of plain, directly abutting the picture plane, with a dark, undisclosed Jean-Siméon Chardin background whose subtly modulated colors sometimes hint at rough stone walls. But (French, 1699-1779) for the little pyramid of the fruit and the reflective glossiness of the pewter cup, none St/7/ Life with Peaches, of the elegance or luxury of the aristocratic supper remains: Chardin brought the a Silver Goblet, Crapes, courtly French still life down-market and made it middle class—his own artisanal and Walnuts, c. 1760 9 Oil on canvas, 37.8 x 46.7 cm middle class. And as he did so, he also found remarkably subtle ways to deploy plain 7 3 (i4 /a x i8 /s in.) things to point to material relations between the made and the natural, as in the Los Angeles, j. Paul crafted pewter next to the artificially mounded peaches, and even to suggest social Getty Museum 86.PA.544 relations between the group and the individual, as in the grape that strays from its cluster, like a sly metaphor for the emergent value of the individual as against the social mass. (This device was repeatedly used by the eighteenth-century master.) These are all contrivances and qualities that must have appealed to Cézanne like no 54 CÉZANNE IN THE STUDIO