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 Pierre Rosenberg, _Chardin, 1699-1779_, Exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris; Cleveland Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Cleveland, 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. Dr. 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 to Anne Halpern, 14 April 2007, in NGA curatorial files). Armand Dayot and Léandre Vaillat, _L'Oeuvre de J. B. S. Chardin et de J. H. Fragonard_, Paris, 1907: 4, no. 12, list the painting as owned by Mrs. Simpson. Harry Brooks of Wildenstein & Co. gives differing information in a letter of 11 September 1978 to David Rust (in NGA curatorial files), which says their Paris office "found records to the effect that the picture was bought [by the Simpsons] in March, 1914."
Accession Number
1942.5.1
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
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.)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
Gift of Mrs. John W. Simpson
Tags
Painting Baroque (1600–1750) Oil Painting Canvas French
Background & Context
Background Story
A young man at a window blows a soap bubble while a younger child watches in fascination. It is one of Chardin's most reproduced and most philosophical paintings, a vanitas image of breathtaking subtlety. The soap bubble — fragile, transient, reflecting the world in miniature — was a traditional symbol of life's impermanence. But Chardin's treatment refuses to be reductive. The young man is not a moral exemplum but a real person caught in a moment of absorption, and the bubble is not just a symbol but a physical marvel, its surface shimmering with reflected light in a way that only Chardin could paint.
Cultural Impact
Soap Bubbles belongs to a group of paintings that Chardin made in the early 1730s depicting young people at windows and doorways — moments of leisure and reverie that are simultaneously genre scenes and philosophical meditations. The window frame creates a threshold between interior and exterior, between the world of thought and the world of sensation, that gives the simple scene extraordinary depth.
Why It Matters
Soap Bubbles is the painting that best demonstrates Chardin's unique position in 18th-century art: simultaneously a painter of everyday life and a philosopher of perception. The bubble is both a physical object rendered with unprecedented fidelity and a symbol of impermanence that needs no explanatory text.
