Strawberries in paintings (Jean Siméon Chardin, Basket of Wild Strawberries, 1761)

Chardin’s strawberries are fuzzy-looking, like a pile of red silk moth cocoons, almost out of focus. The relatively crisp contours of the cherries, the peach, heightens this contrast in form. There’s not a lot of information on the surface, no overly meticulous rendering of seeds, just a judicious daub of white here and there, capturing the gleam of a strawberry’s dimpled surface in natural light. Their irregular shape connotes naturalness, sweetness. Charmingly arranged in a pyramidal mound within a wicker basket, the berries suggest leisure, springtime, playfulness. Dare to pick a berry—just a taste, you think no one will notice just one missing—from the wrong part of the mound and they’ll all tumble down. 

The white carnations, trimmed roughly at irregular lengths, one dangling off the edge of the table into the viewer’s space, introduce a pathos to the overall image: they look delicate, papery, not long for this world. Their whiteness makes the berries look positively sanguine, connoting both life and death, bleeding out. The drama of the berries and the carnations are balanced by the sober blue-gray of the water glass, its edges described by highlights, contrasts in tone, a red reflection; there are few hard lines. The “blind” glass has the tone and hollowness of that classic memento mori object, the skull. Sitting in charged relation to one another, rendered with the brushy presence of Chardin’s hand, the objects in this painting make me feel a powerful sense of yearning, mono no aware, a sense of loss or impermanence. I’m nostalgic for a moment in which I was never a participant: the observation of these objects in the studio, procuring them for the still life—who picked these berries? Where in France did they grow? Who cut these flowers? But what compounds the yearning: this scene is entirely imaginary, or at least an amalgamation of observation and imagination. The strawberries’ strawberry-ness would not have appeared so in real life—that’s Chardin’s contribution. I can’t enter the world of this painting—I’m not Chardin—but I am dying to see this painting in person.