The painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin worked closely with several printmakers to reproduce his work in etching and engraving. (The Game of Knucklebones is a reproduction of Chardin’s oil painting by the same name, on view nearby.) These reproductive prints not only made Chardin’s work known to a larger audience, but also provided the artist with another source of income, one more lucrative than his paintings. Pierre Filloeul made The Game of Knucklebones and Soap Bubbles in 1739, the year he advertised them in a contemporary journal as works influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting, in which there was great interest at the time. Soap Bubbles is a charming scene of two boys at play, but like its seventeenth-century source of inspiration, its bubble imagery suggests the fragility and transience of life itself.