EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

I have wondered for some years why so many still-lifes have an open drawer under the table? I wrote a blog about it last month promising to explain the conundrum here. 

In Chardin's painting of a child quietly watching a teetotum turn, the open drawer reveals a piece of red chalk and its holder, a very clear reference to the artist and his tools in the near foreground close to the picture's edge. The studio and subject have been fused. But why a drawer? 

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In Picasso's series of Still-Lifes and Coffee-Pot, most include an open drawer. True artists, though, rarely do something for compositional purpose alone; it's usually part of some overall meaning.

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In a quasi-stlll-life running with ants, Salvador Dali made the open drawer a particularly prominent feature. I include his example because it was in a sketch by Dali that I found the answer.

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In this drawing Dali included the lower portion of an easel. The only sign of it is the little shelf that supports the bottom of the canvas with a knob to adjust its height. It looks like the one in the paintings. I am now quite certain that the knob is used in art as a signal to other artists that we are looking at a scene during its own creation, on the easel. Picasso and Chardin's images - like virtually all the images on this site - are an image in the mind of the artist, a fusion of the studio and the artist's subject during the creative moment.

The open drawer is mysterious; it suggests many secrets. One of them, at the very least, has now been revealed.