Jean-Siméon Chardin
The Paris painter of kitchen tables and children at play, who caught a soap bubble on canvas around 1733.
Mentioned in
How a bubble holds its shape
A soap bubble’s wall is a hundred times thinner than a hair. How does something like that hold its shape? The story starts with an 18th-century painting and ends with a blind physicist who worked out the bubble’s rules from what other people told him.