CHARDIN, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon

Chardin’s carefully constructed still lifes do not bulge with appetizing foods but are concerned with the objects themselves and with the treatment of light.

An anecdote illustrating Chardin’s genius and his unique position in 18th-century painting is told by one of his greatest friends, the engraver Charles-Nicolas Cochin, who wrote a letter shortly after Chardin’s death to Haillet de Couronne, the man who was to deliver Chardin’s eulogy to the Academy of Rouen, of which Chardin had been a member.

One day, an artist was making a big show of the method he used to purify and perfect his colours. Monsieur Chardin, impatient with so much idle chatter, said to the artist, But who told you that one paints with colours? With what then? the astonished artist asked. One uses colours, replied Chardin, but one paints with feeling.

Chardin ranks as one of the forerunners of modern painting. Volumes and empty spaces stand in a reciprocal relationship within his compositions. There is a magical quality to the mutual self-definition of the assembled objects, each of which possesses its own field of tension and individual aura. Chardin succeeds in lending objects an emotional dimension, in animating them, without stripping them of their concrete tangibility His achievement consists of enriching a painting based on art and tradition with everyday experience, actualised thanks to direct observation from nature. His masterly brushwork interprets his preliminary studies and eschews the danger of formulaic banality and the vapid perpetuation of well-known motifs.

This painting representing a variety of flowers in a blue and white Delft vase is the only surviving flower piece by Chardin.

This overdoor painting - together with the Attributes of Art (Louvre) and Attributes of Sciences (untraced) - was commissioned for the royal château of Choisy. This emblematic canvas has a sense of composition that would impress the cubists.

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This composition of powerful concentration, along with a group of richly impastoed still-lifes representing foodstuffs and utensils, can be related in style to The Ray and The Buffet (both in the Louvre) and dated similarly to about 1728.

Her flushed cheeks suggest that this neat child of upper middle class is returning from a rousing game of badminton, which caused powder from her hair to fall on her shoulders. She wears wide panniers on either side of her brown day dress, protected by an apron. Small sewing scissors and a pin cushion hang from her belt.

There are rarely men in Chardin’s domestic interiors, and where boys occur they usually require - if only by implication — to be disciplined. It is mothers and quasi-maternal women who are prominent: preparing meals and children for school or church, and for household tasks. Part of the power of the subtly-painted La Gouvernante comes from the sense of everything in it being tightly organized, both aesthetically and morally. The gouvernante (not a ‘governess’ in English nineteenth-century terms) admonishes the boy in a strictly private way - but the lesson for future conduct of life is clear, though unstated.

This portrait is the pendant of Chardin’s Self-Portrait with an Eyeshade. The two portraits were exhibited together at the salon of the Acad�mie Royale in 1775. Marguerite Pouget (1707-1791) was the artist’s second wife. Bereft of his first in 1735, he remarried this affluent widow in 1744, who helped him in his charge as treasurer of the Acad�mie and in maintaining his correspondence.

This painting is Chardin’s largest anecdotal figure piece. In subject, it goes back to Dutch seventeenth-century sources, as the artist’s domestic scenes so often do.

Failing eyesight and poor health in his last years led Chardin to change his medium to pastel, but he continued to work and exhibit. He first exhibited pastel heads in 1771, and for the rest of his life he continued to produce similar heads, several of which are lost or unidentified. What he could achieve in the medium, however, remains memorably, movingly clear in the well-known portrait of himself. It owes little to La Tour or Perronneau. Instead, pastel is made to conform to Chardin’s ever-recognizable technique: hatching, inlaying of colour, tonal sensitivity without illusionistic tricks, marvellous firmness of forms - utter unsentimentality of vision - such are the qualities of the pastel portraits. Chardin had indeed always possessed them, and was triumphantly in his late seventies to prove that he retained them.

The success of pastel portrait, introduced by Rosalba Carriera around 1720, fully corresponded to the cult makeup (preparing the sitter with cosmetics), for they provided Maurice Quentin de La Tour with a perfect, powdery medium for recording the vague smiles and expressions, the soft grace and irony of his aristocratic sitters. In contrast, the dense strong and personal pastels by Chardin constitute an exception to the rule, by an artist who rejected convention.

This is one of the many versions of kitchen maids and servants painted by Chardin.

There are three known autograph versions of Soap Bubbles, two in horizontal formats (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), and the vertical composition in Washington. In each of the known versions, an adolescent boy leans on a window ledge fringed with vines and blows through a straw, intensely concentrating on the large soap bubble at its tip. A young child strains over the ledge to watch.

An engraving of the Soap Bubbles, published in 1739, matches none of the three extant paintings precisely. It seems most likely that there existed a fourth version, now lost.

Still-lifes are the most precise expression of Chardin’s genius. People, animals, flowers, inanimate objects. all were less than things to him: they were mere cavities filled with colour and light in the required degree and order. This still-life is one of the tributes Chardin made to his contemporary, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, whose Mercury Tying his Sandal reigns over the attributes of the other arts.

Chardin’s paintings, inspired by the 17th-century painting of Flanders and Holland, reproduce simple, everyday objects in a direct manner, emphasizing the materiality of the objects and their realism. His contemporary, the critic and theoretician Diderot, praised him for his clarity and truth in the representation of nature.

This still-life was painted by the artist during his later years. In 1728 he was accepted as a painter of animals and fruit at the Paris Academy of Art without having to fulfil the usual requirements.

The structure of this painting is simpler than in his earlier still-lifes, and Chardin has reduced the number of objects to a minimum. By singling out and thus monumentalizing the motif of the bird, Chardin gives it considerably more emphasis. According to the categories of feudal game law, the pheasant was seen as reserved for the nobility, but the hunting trophy which has been attached to the pheasant has, from a bourgeois point of view, lost its value of triumphantly demonstrating man’s lordship over nature. However, the way in which the pheasant is rendered does not indicate in any way that colour is gradually becoming detached from the object. Rather, the careful, delicate application of the paint - even in the more roughened structures - heightens the element of sensitive empathy. Unlike the game still-lifes of his contemporaries - which have a smooth, cold objectiveness about them - the artist has created an atmosphere of intimacy between the viewer and the object.

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After 1750, Chardin returned to still-lifes, with greater scope and magnificent effects, such as the grays and browns of the Still-Life with Game, offset by the russet plumage and gold fruit.

This painting is an example of Chardin’s characteristically painterly approach to the subject matter of dead rabbits, birds, or other game arranged on a thick stone slab. Textures of fur and feathers are richly worked in the oil paint, and while the illusion is brilliant from a certain distance, a closer look reveals that he paint takes on a life of its own.

Strongly and consciously evocative of people are the still-lifes of Chardin like the Pipe and Jug. Here it is the very essence of the objects that matters. For all Diderot’s praise, Chardin is not obsessed with surface appearances but with what lies beneath. Yet the objects themselves are deliberately homely; they are possible possessions for anyone and, like Chardin’s people, they suggest use. At their richest they are comparatively poor; the utensils are more often those of kitchen than dining-room; and they form in fact a logical extension of the lives that Chardin’s genre pictures depict.

This painting is characteristic of Chardin’s approach to still-life in the later part of his career. The format is small and intimate. The objects chosen for depiction, at about life size, are comfortably ordinary: a pear, several apples, a knife, and a white porcelain mug, resting on a unadorned stone ledge.

The Attentive Nurse, or the Nourishment of Convalescence, as it was described in the Salon catalogue of 1747, is one of Chardin’s most refined and exquisitely finished paintings. The scene depicts a nurse who is evidently preparing a meal for an invalid. While the delicacy of the treatment is typical of eighteenth century, the choice of a genre subject shows the influence of seventeenth century Dutch domestic scenes, which Chardin studied in his youth.

At the Salon of 1747 it was exhibited together with a companion piece. It is debated whether the other painting was the Kitchen Maid or the Servant Returning from the Market.

Along with the elaborate meal-tables and fruit and game pieces, in the 1760s Chardin began to paint still-lifes of a more sheerly decorative kind, with musical instruments and attributes of the sciences and the arts in the shape of a microscope, books, portfolios, and plaster models, the natural and the physical are replaced by artifacts and the mental. The still-life shown in the picture, which once belonged to Pigalle’s widow, contains a plaster model of Pigalle’s Mercury.

Several of these still-lifes were commissioned as overdoors for the royal châteaux, and then repeated.

This painting is amongst the earliest works of the artist. It is assumed by critics that this work was originally intended as a pendant to the early still-life of The Attributes of the Arts with a Bust of Mercury in the collection of the Pushkin Museum, Moscow.

The date of 1728 is suggested for the painting by critics. In that year Chardin entered the Acad�mie, listed as a painter “skilled in animals fruits” and became most noted for his important works both dated 1728, The Ray Fish, and The Sideboard. The Ray Fish arguably proclaimed the artist’s ambition and caused a sensation allowing Chardin entry to the Acad�mie and inspiring Diderot to say were he to train his son as an artist this is the picture he would have him copy.

This painting of Chardin earned him the title of painter of “animals and fruit.”

Commissioned for the king by Le Normant de Tournehem, the Director of Buildings, and exhibited in the Salon of 1751, the painting subsequently became part of the collection of the Marquis de Marigny, Madame Pompadour’s brother. One of Chardin’s last genre scenes, it shows the painter influenced by Dutch art, using a detailed language and a delicate balance of light.

Chardin’s Copper Drinking Fountain is of radical freshness and offers a strikingly different view of unimportant everyday objects previously and for the most part still overlooked. In its compositionally significant position on the central axis of the picture, the copper urn is the main attraction of the quiet scene and its central motif. What may at first sight seem to be a random detail extracted from a larger context is in fact a composition as calculated as it is convincing. The modern connoisseur of this painting will not be looking through indifferent eyes at a piece of hydraulic equipment. The ravishing painterly execution relegates the subject of the picture firmly into the background: what remains in the memory are atmospheric values.

A young man with a pigtail and a tricorn hat stands at a table sharpening with a knife a crayon in a holder. Before him on a drawing-board lies a half-finished sketch of a bearded man. The same youthful model is to be found in other paintings by Chardin, such as the House of Cards in the National Gallery in London and a similar picture in the Oskar Reinhart collection in Winterthur. The individual features of the sitter and the half-length treatment give the picture the character of a portrait, which was not, however, the artist’s intention. Chardin’s interest lay in the commonplace, in the aesthetic values of everyday life, which he - like Vermeer - brings out in the still-life posture of those he portrayed.

Chardin was received into the Paris Academy in 1728 as an animal and fruit painter. During the 1730s he produced a series of half-length portrayals of children, busily engaged at a table, in the style of The Draughtsman. Following the success of the latter, he produced a second version, which - signed and dated 1737 like the Berlin picture - is now in the Louvre. In 1738 The Draughtsman - which of the two versions is not certain was exhibited in the Paris Salon and in 1940 a mezzotint print by J. Faber brought it to the notice of a wider public.

Chardin’s work is in striking contrast to the courtly art of his contemporaries, Boucher and Fragonard. In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, he met with considerable success. In a certain sense his pictures represented a bourgeois world, which had grown tired of the cultural domination of the Court. The mere choice of subject satisfied a need for a simpler and more natural life - another component of the age of gallantry - and at the same time, managed to come up to the highest standards of painting.

In 1779 this painting was in Unter den Linden, the Berlin palace of Prince Henry, a brother of Frederick II. It may be identical with a picture of Chardin’s which the king is known to have bought in 1747 in Paris through Count Rothenburg. The painting, which documentary evidence shows to have been in palaces at Potsdam during the nineteenth century, remained in the possession of the former royal house after the fall of the monarchy and was purchased in 193I for the Berlin Gallery.

At a time when large-scale heroic narrative painting was thought to be the most meritorious, Chardin, thwarted by his lack of academic training in drawing, became one of the greatest practitioners of the ‘lowly’ art of still life. Born in Paris, where he spent most of his life, he first trained at the guild school of Saint-Luc, before gaining admittance to the French Royal Academy in the category of a still-life and animal painter. By the end of his life his works were to be found in most of the great private collections of the time. Although totally dependent on observation and on working closely from nature, Chardin evolved methods of painting at a distance from the model, so that he was able to reconcile particular detail with a more generalised effect. While some critics deplored his inability to paint more ‘elevated’ subjects others, like the influential philosopher Diderot, praised the ‘magic’ of his brush: ‘This magic defies understanding…it is a vapour that has been breathed onto the canvas…Approach the painting, and everything comes together in a jumble, flattens out, and vanishes; move away, and everything creates itself and reappears.’

In the early 1730s, perhaps in response to the amicable taunt of Joseph Aved, a portrait-painter friend, Chardin also turned to small-scale figure painting, influenced by the Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century masters of everyday scenes. Encouraged by the success of these homespun compositions of kitchen maids and serving men at work, he moved from the sculleries of the bourgeoisie to their living quarters. By narrowing the focus to the half-length figure, he was also able to enlarge it in scale, as he does here. In this wonderfully intimate and contemplative picture, he portrays the son of his friend Monsieur Lenoir, a furniture-dealer and cabinet-maker.

The House of Cards owes its subject to the moralising vanitas paintings of the seventeenth century. The verses under the engraving of the picture, published in 1743, stress the insubstantiality of human endeavours, as frail as a house of cards. But the painting tends to undermine the moral. Its rigorously geometric and stable composition gives an air of permanence which contradicts the fugitive nature of the boy’s pastime, and of childhood itself. Chardin’s ‘magic accord’ of tones envelops the scene securely in its warm and subtle light, at once direct and diffused. His technique remained secret, although it was suspected that he used his thumb as much as his brush. We can well believe, however, his response to the enquiry of a mediocre painter, ‘We use colours, but we paint with feeling.’

This is the last of the four versions of the subject by Chardin. The simple and at the same time elegant composition, the physical and psychological characterization of the boy recalls the famous painting Card Players by Paul C�zanne.

The coins on the table predict that what is a child’s game today will be gaming tomorrow: the ubiquitous pastime, even obsession, of the French elite was gambling. Running a close second was “l’amour’ - which the jack of hearts, facing us from the drawer of the card table, foretells for the absorbed and handsome lad.

There are four variations by Chardin on the theme of a boy building a house of cards: at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire; in the Mus�e du Louvre, Paris; at the National Gallery, London; and at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The painting in the Uffizi is attributed to a studio copyist, although it bears what appears to be Chardin’s signature.

This interior is reminiscent of the interiors of David Teniers’ era. Light and colour are subdued, nothing is sudden or jarring. However, the reference to Netherlandish kitchen scenes is merely superficial, for the similarity is restricted only to the choice of props and the predominantly brown colouring. It would also be wrong to see any allegorical statement in this scene. It simply shows a kitchen maid in an indeterminate room, pausing for a moment in her work. Her expression is one of neither sadness nor joy, her gaze is aimless but not forlorn. The pictorial space, which initially appears to be firmly bounded, turns out to be a kind of nowhere, whose shelter is created entirely by an inner integrity. The moment of contentment and repose freezes into timelessness, into an eternity that harbours a refuge from fear and transience.

Chardin exhibited this work at the Salon of 1739 as La ratisseuse de navets (Woman Scraping Turnips). He painted four versions of the Kitchen Maid. In addition to the Washington version, there is one in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, and another in the collection of the Rijksdienst Beeldende Kunst in the Netherlands. A signed version is lost since 1918.

Chardin stands as a figure apart in French 18th-century painting. Neither the theatrics of Classicism nor the didacticism and frivolity of the Rococo are found in his work. Even the Dutch influence, evident throughout his oeuvre, has an unusual instance: Chardin’s self-absorbed characters do not point toward any moral but rather invite the viewer to thoughtful reflection.

There are three extant versions of The Little Schoolmistress: a signed painting in the National Gallery, London; an unsigned canvas in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; and the signed painting in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. One version was exhibited at the Salon of 1740. The broader dissemination of the image was assured through its engraved replication in a print published by Fran�ois-Bernard L�pici� that same year.

There is an uncertainty whether any of the three extant versions is the painting exhibited by Chardin and released as an engraving by L�pici� in 1740, since none of the three versions is exactly matched by the engraving.

This well-known painting by Chardin exists in several versions. The original painting was offered to Louis XV in 1740. The painting shown here belonged to the artist until his death.

The younger child obediently repeats the prayer after the mother while the older girl is more concerned with food. The didactic meaning of this common 18th-century subject is obvious.

How Chardin paints is far more important than what he paints. Yet his achievement lies in the extraordinary fusion of technique and subject-matter. His people are indeed still-lifes: inexpressive in features, serious and as compact as some man-made object. Child and chair become one in Le Benedicit�. Conveyed through the medium of Chardin’s paint, what might otherwise be a dangerously ‘soft’ theme takes on wonderful toughness, rigorousness, and sobriety.

Chardin was one of the greatest of the 18th century, whose genre and still-life subjects documented the life of the Paris bourgeoisie. He favoured simple still-lifes and unsentimental domestic interiors. His muted tones and ability to evoke textures are seen in the Provider, of which he made several versions.

The term ‘pourvoyeuse’ (provider) was applied both to the daily provider of a middle-class household, and to a woman who sold her “charms” on the street.

It has been suggested that Chardin used his flat as his model in this painting, given that through the first door one can glimpse the Chardin family’s copper fountain, which appears in the still-life named after it.

The painting is one of the artist’s diploma pieces, on the occasion of his reception into the Acad�mie royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1728.

Artists who were not members of the Acad�mie, and who therefore could not exhibit their work in the Salon, took part once a year in what was known as the ‘Salon de Jeunesse’, held on the feast of Corpus Christi in the open air, in the Place Dauphine, and lasting two hours. On 3 June 1728 Chardin exhibited several pictures there, including The Ray and The Buffet. Some academicians who saw the work persuaded Chardin to present himself for membership of the Acad�mie royale; on 25 September of the same year, contrary to the usual practice, Chardin was accepted and admitted on one and the same day. The Acad�mie did not insist on a picture specially painted for the occasion, as was usually the case, but retained The Ray and The Buffet as his diploma pieces. It is related that the artist had deceived several academicians, among them Largilliere and Cazes, by showing them some of his still-life paintings which they took for Flemish works. Certainly, the source of inspiration is obvious in The Ray, which surpasses the best work of Jan Fyt.

The rich quality of the paint surface, which is in perfect condition, has been revealed by the recent cleaning of the varnish. The picture is exceptionally well preserved for a work by Chardin; his paintings often suffered from too heavy a use of oil with his pigment. Perhaps this one owes its good condition to the fact that it dates from his early days, when he was applying himself to improving his technique by creating a chef-d’oeuvre carefully executed according to the best principles of true craftsmanship. Later, he trusted too much to his inspiration, and yielded to his passion for worked-up impasto.

Chardin was a contemporary of Boucher, but no two artists could have been more different. Chardin invariably imbued his deceptively simple compositions with a disregard for mere prettiness. In this still-life Chardin has given ordinary objects of everyday life an aura of dignity and value. The cat creates a sense of conflict between the living and dead animals, underscoring a theme common in Chardin’s genre scenes: the evanescence of life.

Chardin’s career started with a large and untypical, dramatic, genre scene known to the Goncourt brothers but destroyed at the Commune - which showed a barber-surgeon aiding a man wounded in a duel. It had been painted for a barber-surgeon, to serve as a signboard outside his premises, and it is thus comparable to the ‘enseigne’ which Watteau had painted for Gersaint. There Watteau had at last brought his people in from countryfied open-air settings and collected them in an urban environment. Chardin began with a Parisian street scene, but his later genre pictures carry us indoors into much more intimate, and less animated, scenes.

In these scenes, although other figures can be visible in the background, the first impression is of a single figure, on which the eye concentrates even while this figure concentrates on a task. Such concentration is typical of Chardin; even when the subject is a boy idly building a card house, or blowing bubbles, there is an intentness that lifts the trivial pastime into an occupation. Unlike Greuze, Chardin never allows his people to ogle the spectator, to act the housemaid or village girl; they are absorbed, absorbed almost literally in the wonderful paint surface which seems to express integrity by the very oil medium.

In 1733 Chardin begins to return to the themes and formulas of the popular genre scenes of seventeenth-century Dutch painting prized by Parisian connoisseurs. Applying their realistic treatment to the bourgeois interiors of his time, Chardin depicts such everyday occupations as household chores and the upbringing of children. The moral character of these themes, in praise of the simple family life, contributed to dignifying the genre.

Diderot could have no higher praise of a Chardin still-life than to say: ‘C’est la nature même.’ And for him Chardin remained the great magician-painter whose canvases deceived the eye by their tremendous realism, down to the very textures of the objects painted. Such pictures kept the spectator completely within his own experience, and to some extent that is true of all the pictures painted by Chardin - including those genre scenes which were executed chiefly in the years before Diderot wrote of the Salons, but which are also in their way still-lives. Neither category of picture was novel, and Chardin might seem merely to be practicing what had been among the most typical products of Dutch seventeenth-century painting.

Chardin’s work contains, in every sense of the word, a moral: the importance of truth, the necessity for strict guidance of children, the dignity of labour. He never weakens his art by explicit statement of such things; they are the essential fibre out of which it grows, and everything we know suggests that they were his own beliefs. The public understood him instinctively and probably always preferred his genre scenes to his still-lives. His Salon appearances were - especially in the years before Greuze arrived - outstandingly successful.

This is one of the four versions made by Chardin of this subject.

Chardin’s early works already revealed an attention to everyday life that he would retain.

Unlike such highly productive and fashionable artists of the day as Oudry and Boucher, Chardin did not draw. His Young Sketcher, seen from behind copying a large red chalk drawing, represents a somewhat ironic image of the pupil at work.