"La Fontaine," or the "Woman Drawing Water," is one of the two examples of Chardin's art in the National Gallery. It is the subject of which probably most versions are in existence, and figured among the eight pictures sent by the master to the Salon of 1737, the first exhibition held since 1704, and the first in which Chardin appeared as a painter of genre pictures. The original version, which bears the date 1733, is at the Stockholm Museum, and other replicas belong to Sir Frederick Cook in Richmond, M. Marcille in Paris, Baron Schwiter, and to the Louvre. The picture was engraved by Cochin.] The question finds its simplest solution in the fact that all great and lasting art must be based on the study of Nature and of contemporary life; that erudition and the imitation of the virtues of painters that belong to a dead period never result in permanent appeal, especially if they find expression in the repetition of mythological and allegorical formulas which belong to the past, and have long ceased to be a living language. Chardin's art is living and sincere, with never a trace of affectation. In his paintings the most unpromising material, the most prosaic objects on a humble kitchen table, the uneventful daily routine of lower middle-class life, are rendered interesting by the warming flame of human sympathy which moved the master to spend his supreme skill upon them; by the human interest with which he knew how to invest even inanimate objects. No painter knew like Chardin how to express in terms of paint the substance and surface and texture of the most varied objects; few have ever equalled him in the faultless precision of his colour values; fewer still have carried the study of reflections to so fine a point, and observed with such accuracy the most subtle nuances of the changes wrought in the colour appearance of one object by the proximity of another--but these are qualities that only an artist can fully appreciate, and that can only be vaguely felt by the layman. They belong to the sphere of technique. The strong appeal of Chardin's still-life is due to the manner in which he invests inanimate objects with living interest, with a sense of intimacy that enlists our sympathy for the humble folk with whose existence these objects are connected, and who, by mere accident as it were, just happen to be without the frame of the picture. Perhaps they have just left the room, but the atmosphere is still filled with their presence.