Chardin's still-life pictures never appear to be grouped to form balanced arrangements of line and colour. The manner how the objects are seen in the accidental position in which they were left by the hands that used them holds more than a suggestion of genre painting. Indeed, it may be said that all Chardin's still-life partakes of genre as much as his genre partakes of still-life. A loaf of bread, a knife, and a black bottle on a crumpled piece of paper; a basket, a few eggs, and a copper pot, and such like material, suffice for him to create so vivid a picture of simple home life, that only the presence of the housewife or serving-maid is needed to raise the painting into the sphere of domestic genre. Sometimes this scarcely needed touch of actual life is given by the introduction of some domestic animal; and in these cases we already find a hint of that unity of conception which in Chardin's genre pieces links the living creature to the surrounding inanimate objects. Take the famous "Skate" at the Louvre. On a table you see an earthen pot, a saucepan, a kettle, and a knife, grouped in accidental disorder on a negligently spread white napkin on the right; on the left are some fish and oysters and leeks, and from the wall behind is suspended a huge skate. A cat is carefully feeling its way among the oyster-shells, deeply interested in the various victuals which it eyes with eager longing. Even more pronounced is this attitude of interest in Baron Henri de Rothschild's "Chat aux Aguets." Here a crouching cat, half puzzled, half excited, is seen in the extreme left corner, crouching in readiness to spring at a dead hare that is lying between a partridge and a magnificent silver tureen, and is obviously the object of the feline's hesitating attention.