The Ray (Chardin)

The Ray (French: La raie) is a still-life oil painting by the 18th-century French painter Jean Siméon Chardin depicting a gutted skate, suspended above a kitchen table, surrounded by an array of utensils, oysters, and other provisions. The piece is regarded as one of Chardin's most important still life works and played a vital role in his acceptance into the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1728. It was first exhibited at the Exposition de la Jeunesse [fr] on 3 June 1728 and has long been held by the Louvre in Paris. This painting is widely noted for its visceral depiction of the lacerated skate, its emphasis on materiality and bodily interior, and the arrangement of domestic objects within a kitchen environment, which has been interpreted as challenging conventional approaches to still life painting in the eighteenth century.

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