The third great artist who gained his first success by means of a sign was Chardin. A friend of his father, a surgeon, who did not disdain to play the barber as a side issue had given him the order. It was not unusual for doctors to hang out a pretty sign; if they were poetically inclined, they ventured a little rhyme on it, as shown by this Dutch example:-- “Den Chirurgijn Vermindert de pijn Door Gods Genade.” For this respect the barber and hair-dressing artists showed no less talent, as this French verse will sufficiently prove:-- “La Nature donne barbe et cheveux Et moi, je les coupe tous les deux.” Well, our “chirurgien-barbier” followed the general custom of his time and ordered a sign. Naturally he expected Chardin to paint on it all his knives, his trepan, and other instruments of torture, and was not a little surprised to find something very different. The proportions of the signboard, which was very long, twelve feet long by three feet high, had suggested to the young artist an animated composition which he styled “les suites d’un duel dans la rue” and for which all the members of his family had been obliged to pose as models. Only one part of the picture, where the wounded was carried to a surgeon’s office, referred to the business of his father’s friend. Fearing, therefore, a possible objection on his part, the artist took the precaution to fasten the sign in the night to the doctor’s house, who was awakened in the morning by a big crowd assembled before it, evidently admiring the chef d’Œuvre. Unfortunately this early work of Chardin’s no longer exists. His paintings, so much more serious and solid than the frivolities of Boucher and Lancret, the idols of the public of his time, have only recently, in our democratic times, received fully the appreciation they deserve. But the most famous of signs painted by a great artist is without doubt the one which Watteau, in 1720, shortly before his death, made for the art dealer Gersaint, in three days, “to limber up his stiff old fingers.” It is one of the most beautiful things Watteau ever produced and is now in the possession of the German Kaiser. French critics, however, think that it was executed by a pupil, from the original sketch of the master, which has been found and which shows more “loose qualities,” to use an artist’s term. However that may be, the picture that Frederic the Great purchased through his art agent in Paris is a beauty. A good friend of Watteau’s, a Monsieur de Julienne, the first possessor of the sign, and owner of another painted by Watteau for Gersaint’s art shop, entitled “Vertumnus and Pomona,” was very proud of this new possession, as we might judge from the fact that he asked the engraver Aveline to engrave it with this inscription:--