Even though just one single French painter is given prominence, this one artist was loved above all others by Egon von Vietinghoff. There was a tender note in his voice when he talked about the birthday pie or the still life with hares and partridges or the arrangement with pipes and coffee service, or when he looked at in a photo book. Among the other French painters he most respected Fragonard, Delacroix, Courbet and Boudin.

In all of Chardin's paintings – still lifes, genre-paintings, and portraits – we find a specific rapt atmosphere, a solemn and modest simplicity. It is kindred to the tranquility and reverence in the face of nature and the natural manifested in the paintings of Vietinghoff.

A journalist who interviewed Vietinghoff in his Paris studio wrote in the Chicago Tribune of 13 March 1932:

"Some of the still life pieces, which he is planning to include in a show ... have the qualities of a Chardin ... and the ... show may be looked forward to as an event in the art world here."

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And this although he was still deep in the midst of his self-taught experiments and had just painted the first few pictures that had satisfied him! What might this anticipating journalist have written, had he seen the works of his mature and late phases?