And by the tree each put down their stake
What it was or who they agreed
To have as umpire isn’t our affair.
—La Fontaine, “The Hare and the Tortoise”

Whether Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and and François Boucher were ever in conscious competition with each other is a question that will probably have to remain unanswered. No documents have been found that support such a conjecture, which may seem, on the face of it, farfetched. For one thing, they did very different sorts of work. Boucher was a purveyor of sylphs and cherubs in the purest style pâtisserie; in their scrumptious birthday suits these creatures were destined to romp within the boiseries of the intimate suites that came into vogue during the reign of Louis XV. Chardin, by contrast, tackled mostly humble subjects, kitchen still lifes and bourgeois interiors. Boucher was elected professor of history painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, and later was appointed painter to the court; Chardin was barely able to get his foot in the Academy door, and then only as a modest “specialist in animals and fruit.” Yet the social distance between the two was perhaps less great than it seems. Once within the Academy, Chardin became the official hanger of exhibitions, a position of some importance, and his art was more consistently admired by people of taste than was Boucher’s. In the late 1730s, Chardin threw himself into a series of genre pictures which turned out superbly, and, interestingly enough,