The idle play of children was a favorite theme of Chardin's. In this painting of about 1734, he drew inspiration from the seventeenth-century Dutch genre tradition, for both format and subject. While it is not certain that he intended the picture to carry a message, soap bubbles usually allude to the transience of life. Chardin painted two other versions of this picture (Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).

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