The subject of the painting, a middle-class French family saying grace before a meal, is one of everyday bourgeois tranquillity – Chardin's area of interest – with an uncharacteristic touch of sentimentality.

Chardin, who had made his fame painting still life, had at this point in his career started also to include human figures in his works.

[4] Another version was kept by the artist throughout his life, and eventually ended up in the Musée du Louvre, through the large bequest of Louis La Caze in 1869.

The younger of the children can easily appear a girl to the modern eye, if the drum hanging on the child-sized ladderback chair is overlooked,[7] and is indeed identified as such in Gardner.

[11] There are other variants in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (with a small boy added on the left) and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.

[4] In 1848, an anonymous reviewer in the journal Magasin Pittoresque wrote: Watteau did lunches on the grass, walks in the moonlight, the capricious beauty of the day with her elegant lover of choice, dances under the trees with titled shepherds and shepherdesses; but Chardin did the honest and peaceful interior, the mother who clothes her son before sending him to school, the mother teaching her offspring to stutter the name of God...It would seem that one century could not contain two stories so different, yet they coincided.