"What the painters Watteau, Nattier, Boucher, Fragonard did in commemoration of the court life of their century, Chardin did for the life of the lower class"
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (November 2 1699 – December 6,
1779) was an 18th-century French painter. He is considered a master of still
life,[1] and is also noted for his genre paintings which depict kitchen maids,
children, and domestic activities. Carefully balanced composition, soft
diffusion of light and granular impasto characterize his work. Chardin worked
very slowly and painted only slightly more than 200 pictures (about four a
year) total.
Chardin's work had little in common with the Rococo painting
that dominated French art in the 18th century. At a time when history painting
was considered the supreme classification for public art, Chardin's subjects of
choice were viewed as minor categories.
He favored simple yet
beautifully textured still lifes, and sensitively handled domestic interiors
and genre paintings. Simple, even stark, paintings of common household items
(Still Life with a Smoker's Box) and an uncanny ability to portray children's
innocence in an unsentimental manner (Boy with a Top nevertheless found an
appreciative audience in his time, and account for his timeless appeal.
Largely self-taught,
Chardin was greatly influenced by the realism and subject matter of the
17th-century Low Country masters. Despite his unconventional portrayal of the
ascendant bourgeoisie, early support came from patrons in the French aristocracy,
including Louis XV. Though his popularity rested initially on paintings of
animals and fruit, by the 1730s he introduced kitchen utensils into his work
(The Copper Cistern, ca.1735, Louvre).
Soon figures populated his scenes as well, supposedly in response
to a portrait painter who challenged him to take up the genre. Woman Sealing a Letter (ca. 1733), which may
have been his first attempt, was followed by half-length compositions of
children saying grace, as in Le Bénédicité, and kitchen maids in moments of
reflection. These humble scenes deal with simple, everyday activities, yet they
also have functioned as a source of documentary information about a level of
French society not hitherto considered a worthy subject for painting.
The pictures are
noteworthy for their formal structure and pictorial harmony. Chardin has said
about painting, "Who said one paints with colors? One employs colors, but
one paints with feeling."
Chardin frequently painted replicas of his
compositions—especially his genre paintings, nearly all of which exist in
multiple versions which in many cases are virtually indistinguishable. Beginning
with The Governess (1739, in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), Chardin
shifted his attention from working-class subjects to slightly more spacious
scenes of bourgeois life.]
In 1756 he returned to the subject of the still life. In the
1770s his eyesight weakened and he took to painting in pastels, a medium in
which he executed portraits of his wife and himself. His works in pastels are
now highly valued. Chardin's extant
paintings, which number about 200, are in many major museums, including the
Louvre.
Self-portrait, 1771, pastel, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
