The Kitchen Maid

Jean Siméon Chardin

National Gallery of Art

A young woman, holding a knife and vegetable in her lap and wearing a clay-brown jacket over a long, poppy-red skirt, sits on a wooden ladderback chair angled to our right in the center of this vertical painting. She has pale skin with cheeks and lips flushed deep pink. A white cap covers her upswept hair, and a sea-blue and tan neckerchief drapes around her neck. She hunches forward slightly and gazes to our right with parted lips. Her hands rest in her lap, and she holds a knife in her right hand and a white root vegetable in her left. Her lap is draped with an ivory-white cloth, speckled with tan spots that continue onto the hem of her red skirt and the floor. A copper-brown bowl with a flaring lip and a peacock-blue interior sits on the floor at her feet with several irregular white shapes lying inside, presumably peeled vegetables. To her left, our right, is a log-like section of a thick tree trunk with a cleaver embedded in it. The handle of a copper pan leans against the block. The bottom of that pan is propped up against a deep blue-gray bowl with a gold-colored interior. Light coming from the upper left gleams on the edges of the cookware and illuminates a spatter of tomato red on the surface of the chopping block. In the lower left, a handful of dirt-brown tubers are piled near an orange pumpkin or gourd, which is cut off by the edge of the painting. The floor and wall behind the woman are peanut brown washed with thin layers of slate blue. The artist signed and dated the painting in black on the wall above the chopping block, “Chardin 1738.”