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signed lower left Chardin oil on canvas Pierre Rosenberg places the present painting amongst Chardin's earliest works from the period of the late 1720s when the artist entered the Académie and was just starting to explore the genre of still life. In this early work Chardin already reveals his mastery of the subtle interplay of light and shade and a concern for form and mass, both elements that were to become his trademarks and single him out as the master French still life painter of the 18th Century. Chardin reduced what he saw to its essence, focusing in his very early years on still lifes, devoting his attention first to the representation of game and fruit, then to the attributes of arts and sciences, before beginning his better known study of kitchen still life scenes. Pierre Rosenberg suggests that the present work was originally intended as a pendant to the early still life of The Attributes of the Arts with a Bust of Mercury in the collection of the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. Both works share the same Laperlier provenance and were offered in the Laperlier Collection Sale of 1867 at the Hôtel Drouot, Paris. The two paintings would have been originally intended to serve as decorative overdoors. Rosenberg proposes a possible date of 1728 for the Moscow painting, the year that Chardin entered the Académie, listed as a painter "skilled in animals fruits'' and became most noted for his important works both dated 1728, The Ray Fish, and The Sideboard. The Ray Fish arguably proclaimed the artist's ambition and caused a sensation allowing Chardin entry to the Académie and inspiring Diderot to say were he to train his son as an artist this is the picture he would have him copy. The present composition, which is rather sparse, demonstrates Chardin's early lyrical and youthful attempts to experiment with composition, form and modelling. Chardin here carefully creates the stone niche within which he places his objects and begins experimenting