Young kitchen boy playing with a cat, Joseph Bail; oil on canvas; roughly 43 x 28 inches (109 x 71 cm); I don’t know the location of the original, the link is to a gallery site, through which the painting evidently passed at one time, so my assumption would be that it’s in a private collection.
I share with 19th century French painter Joseph-Claude Bail his obviously intense admiration for 18th century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin.
You can see the similarities in his frequent subject matter of simple kitchen themed genre paintings, his strong contrast between dark and light and his beautiful handling of the textures and visual appearance of objects.
In this painting, the large metal (brass?) pot is strongly reminiscent of Chardins’s handling of similar objects.
Bail was influenced by other painters, of course, and put his own distinctive take on things, but my eye was immediately captured by the Chardin-like elements of this scene.
