The Drawing Lesson

In a dim room, a figure bends over a desk, drawing on a sheet of paper. Behind stands a man in a red coat, peering at the work. On the left, a white statue sits on a small chest with a drawer, and a red basin can be seen on the floor in the right foreground.

This work was shown at the 1753 Salon. Chardin's roughly forty years of painting are divided into three periods, and the "period of genre painting," from the 1730s to the early 1750s, is the middle one. During this time, influential foreign nobles are said to have joined the clientele for his genre paintings.

In 1749, Chardin gave Queen Louisa Ulrika of Sweden two paintings, The Drawing Lesson and The Good Education. A few years later he painted a second pair with the same compositions, made for the collector Ange-Laurent La Live de Jully, and this work is one of them. It passed into Swedish hands at an auction in 1770, was kept by the owner's descendants for a long time, and was shown to the public again at the 1979 Chardin exhibition.