Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin

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The French painter Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) is considered by modern critics one of the most important artists of the 18th century as well as one of the most distinguished painters in the history of French art.

Jean Baptiste Chardin was born in Paris on Nov. 2, 1699, the son of a cabinetmaker. He studied painting with Jacques Cazes, Nöel Nicholas Coypel, and Jean Baptiste Van Loo. In 1728 Chardin was admitted to the Royal Academy as "a painter of animals and fruit," not a high rank in the academy but one which satisfied the unpretentious artist. The two paintings which won him admission into the academy were The Rayfish and The Buffet, paintings of fish, fruit, jugs, and other objects decoratively assembled in rather rich compositions enlivened by the presence of animals; both works are in the tradition of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish still-life painting.

After about 1730 Chardin began to paint the genre subjects for which he is best known: small, humble scenes of the everyday life of the Parisian lower middle class with which he was so familiar and to which he belonged. These paintings depict women working in kitchens, children playing quiet solitary games, mothers serving meals; they are simple scenes of ordinary domestic events presented without drama and without emotional flourishes, but Chardin invests them with dignity and humanity. They reveal an aspect of 18th-century French life never seen in the work of the fashionable artists who were patronized by the court and the aristocracy and who produced decorative, elegant, sensual, and light-hearted paintings in the dominant rococo style established by Antoine Watteau in the early years of the century.

By the late 1730s Chardin's value as an artist was recognized, and he began to enjoy success in spite of the fact that his work set him apart from the mainstream of French painting. Connoisseurs and collectors purchased his work, and engravings of his paintings became extremely popular. Good examples of his genre paintings are The Grace (ca. 1740), which King Louis XV purchased; Child with Top (1738); and Back from the Market (1739). Chardin is equally famous for the still-life paintings which he did throughout his career. The best of these are arrangements of a few simple objects such as copper kitchen utensils, a wineglass, a pottery bowl, a peach; examples are Still Life with Pipe and Kitchen Still Life.

Chardin's style is one of restraint, understatement, and a simplicity that approaches the severe. His colors are often subdued and cool, and many of his later still lifes have an almost austere formality. Chardin cannot, however, be wholly divorced from the rococo style or from the traditions of his century, although he was never a decorative rococo painter like François Boucher or Jean Honoré Fragonard. The 18th century was fond of the small and the intimate, and Chardin's works have these qualities. The subtle complexity of his compositions, his love of refined textures, and his perception of the trembling tonal values of light are also manifestations of contemporary artistic taste. Chardin's style is uniquely his own, but analysis of it reveals the extent to which he belonged to his period.

In 1757 Chardin was granted an apartment in the Louvre, which was not used by the kings of France as a residence at that time and which housed the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In 1768 King Louis XV gave him a pension. By that time public taste had turned from Chardin's modest scenes to an enthusiastic reception of the melodramatic, sentimental, and moralizing peasant genre of Jean Baptiste Greuze. Chardin continued to paint, however, although during the 1770s his eyesight weakened; he turned to the use of pastel and during the last few years of his life produced impressive work in this difficult medium. He died in Paris on Dec. 6, 1779.

Further Reading

The most comprehensive work on Chardin in English is Georges Wildenstein, Chardin (1969), a combination and translation of his two earlier works, in French, of the same title (1933 and 1963). Other works in English include Bernard Denvir, Chardin (1950), and Pierre Rosenberg, Chardin (1963; trans. 1963), which contains many excellent illustrations. An older but useful work is E. Herbert and A. Furst, Chardin (1911). Roger Fry, French, Flemish, and British Art (1951), contains an analysis of Chardin's work by an important modern critic who admired it without reservation. An excellent and sympathetic examination of Chardin in the context of 18th-century painting is presented in Michael Levey, Rococo to Revolution: Major Trends in Eighteenth Century Painting (1966). References to Chardin can be found in Arno Schönberger and Halldor Soehner's handsomely illustrated The Rococo Age: Art and Civilization of the 18th Century (1959; trans. 1960).

Additional Sources

Conisbee, Philip, Chardin, Lewisburg N.J.: Bucknell University Press, 1986. Roland Michel, Marianne, Chardin, New York: Abrams, 1996.

Rosenberg, Pierre, Chardin, Geneva: Skira; New York: Rizzoli, 1991.

Chardin, Jean-Baptiste Siméon (1699-1779). French painter. In 1737 he exhibited La Fontaine and La Blanchisseuse at the Salon, and the art collector Mariette recorded in 1759 that engravers competed for the right to reproduce them—often with a moralizing sub-text. Chardin exhibited until 1773 in the Salon, where Diderot admired his deceptively direct, morally elevating genre scenes. He reserved his most unstinting praise, however, for the paint handling and naturalism of Chardin's still-life subjects. Royalty, members of the aristocracy, and many major artists collected his paintings. The king allotted him rooms in the Louvre (1757), and he held high office in the Academy. After a period of eclipse his reputation was restored around 1846. Proust wrote an essay on Chardin, included in Contre Sainte-Beuve.

[Patsy Campbell]

Chardin, Jean-Baptistesiméon (1699–1779), French painter. During the first half of the eighteenth century, authors, artists, and intellectuals defined themselves by staking out a position on the central aesthetic question of the period: Should they model their cultural production on the ancients or strike out in new directions as moderns? On the controversy between ancients and moderns, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin was a modern. In The Monkey as Antiquarian (c. 1740, Chartres) he parodies the enthusiast of antiquity by representing him as a foolish monkey scrutinizing an ancient coin through a magnifying glass, a type of image popularized by other moderns like David Teniers the Younger (Flemish, 1610–1690) and Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721).

Chardin was born in Paris. His father was a master artisan who constructed billiard tables, and his mother's father crafted game racquets. His brother became a marchand mercier (a person who combined the functions of an antiques dealer and an interior decorator). Although he was trained in painting by Pierre Jacques Cazes (1676–1754) and Noël Nicolas Coypel (1690–1734), both members of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, Chardin joined the Parisian guild, the Académie de Saint-Luc, before applying for admission to the academy. His association with the guild suggests that, like his family, he originally intended to work within the orbit of the Parisian luxury trades.

In 1728, however, he deserted the guild for the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which received him as an artist with a specialty in "animals and fruits" on the basis of The Ray (c. 1725, Musée du Louvre, Paris) and The Buffet (1728, Louvre). At this time, the classifying system of the academy did not include a category for a modern life subject like The Game of Billiards (c. 1723; Musée Carnavalet, Paris), a painting in which Chardin represented a congenial group of elite, urbane men watching a billiard match. Paintings of hunting trophies and fruits or flowers, by contrast, had been recognized as legitimate subjects by the Royal Academy since its foundation.

Chardin painted a variety of subjects in an array of formats and manners. Young Student Drawing (c. 1734, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) is a small wooden panel approximately seven inches square that can be held in the hand, but A Lady Sealing a Letter (1733, Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin) is a large composition on canvas over five feet high designed for the wall. In Rabbit, Copper Pot, Quince, and Two Chestnuts (c. 1739, Stockholm) his handling of form is broad and rough, whereas in The Butler's Table (1756, Carcassonne) it is meticulous and detailed. He created portraits in oil like Portrait of Charles Godefroy (c. 1734, Louvre) and in pastel, such as Self-Portrait Wearing Spectacles (1771, Louvre). In 1732 he exhibited a trompel'oeil painting of a bronze relief after a work by the Flemish artist François Duquesnoy (1597–1643), Eight Children Playing with a Goat, a motif also seen in the lower half of The Attributes of the Arts (1731, Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris). Although the relief looks classical, it is actually not antique but the work of a modern, for Duquesnoy lived in the seventeenth century. Duquesnoy's relief was reproduced by other modern painters, particularly Gerard Dou (Dutch, 1613–1675), with whom Chardin was compared by contemporaries.

Chardin's long and successful career unfolded within the bounds of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. He became an officer (conseiller) of the academy in 1743, pensioned by the crown in 1752, elected treasurer of the academy in 1755, and awarded a studio and lodging at the king's expense in the Louvre in 1757. In 1755 he was also entrusted with hanging the pictures and displaying the statues in the academy's public exhibition known as the salon, a position he retained until 1774. From the first regularly established salon, held in 1737, and for fourteen years thereafter, Chardin exhibited only figure paintings, mainly of modern life subjects like The Governess (1738, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa). These compositions, and the engraved prints made after them, brought Chardin international fame. Domestic Pleasures (1746, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) was commissioned by the crown princess of Sweden. The print made after the image was dedicated to a Swedish countess, and one of them hung, framed and under glass, in the Parisian residence of the marquise de Pompadour. Then Chardin reversed this exhibition pattern in 1753; excepting the late pastels, from 1753 to 1779 his offerings to the salon shifted to still-life subjects and an occasional re-exhibition or repetition of one of his then well-known figure paintings from the 1730s or 1740s.

Chardin confounds nineteenth-century notions of exceptionality by his frequent practice of repeating compositions and motifs. For example, three extant canvases of The Return from Market by Chardin's hand are signed and dated, making it impossible to ascertain which is the original (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1738; Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin, 1738; Louvre, 1739).

Bibliography

Conisbee, Philip. Chardin. Lewisburg, Pa., 1986.

Roland Michel, Marianne. Chardin. London and New York, 1996.

Rosenberg, Pierre. Chardin 1699–1779. Exh. cat. Paris, 1979.

Scott, Katie. "Chardin Multiplied." In Chardin, Exh. cat., pp. 60–75. New York, 2000.

—PAULA REA RADISICH