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National Gallery of Art - THE COLLECTION
image of Soap Bubbles
Jean Siméon Chardin (artist)
French, 1699 - 1779
Soap Bubbles, probably 1733/1734
oil on canvas
Overall: 93 x 74.6 cm (36 5/8 x 29 3/8 in.) framed: 116.2 x 97.8 x 11.4 cm (45 3/4 x 38 1/2 x 4 1/2 in.)
Gift of Mrs. John W. Simpson
1942.5.1
From the Tour: 18th-Century France — Chardin and Portraiture
Object 1 of 11

Provenance

Probably Adolphe Eugéne Gabriel Roehn [1780-1867], Paris, by 1845.[1] Laurent Laperlier [1805-1878], Paris and Mustapha, Algeria, by 1860;[2] (his sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 11-13 April 1867, 1st day, no. 10); purchased by Biesta. (Gimpel and Wildenstein, New York and Paris); sold 1905 to John Woodruff Simpson [1850-1920], New York;[3] by inheritance to his widow, Katherine Seney Simpson [d. 1943], New York; gift 1942 to NGA.

[1] See Paris, Cleveland and Boston 1979: 205 for a discussion of the likely Roehn provenance. The painting is probably the one described as having been seen in the studio of "M. Roehn" in L'Artiste(5 August 1845): 72.

[2] Laperlier lent the painting to an exhibition in Paris in 1860. He was a member of the military administration in Algeria after the French colonization of that country, and was an art patron and collector.

[3] According to René Gimpel, Diary of an Art Dealer, trans. by John Rosenberg, New York, 1966: 300, discussing his father's sales for 1905. Diana Kostyrko, who completed her dissertation about René Gimpel for the Australian National University in 2007 and was given access by the Gimpel family to the original diaries, has kindly confirmed this diary passage and says that Gimpel was reading from an accounts book when he wrote the entry (e-mail of 14 April 2007, in NGA curatorial files). Differing information is given in a letter of 11 September 1978 from Harry Brooks of Wildenstein & Co. to David Rust (in NGA curatorial files), which says their Paris office "found records to the effect that the pictures was bought [by the Simpsons] in March, 1914."

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