Chardin

Chardin by Frederick Wedmore (1899)

Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, born in Paris on 2 November 1699 in the St. Sulpice quarter, was the son of a cabinet-maker who built billiard tables for the King. Given little formal education, he entered the painting-room of M. Cazes but learned almost nothing there, becoming instead his own teacher and shaping both his technique and his choice of subject: the familiar, frugal, refined life of the French lower bourgeoisie. He met Marguerite Saintar at a gathering arranged by his parents and formed a mutual attachment to her. In 1728, at twenty-nine, he was received into the Academy, and in 1731 he married her, though by then she had lost her small fortune and his father opposed the match. The marriage lasted four years before her death, leaving a son. At forty-five he married again, a widow named Francoise Marguerite Pouget, of the same parish, who remained with him through the rest of his life. His later years brought the death of his son, who had been his pupil, along with declining fame and the pain of stone followed by dropsy. He received the last sacrament and died on 6 December 1779, as recorded in a letter from Doyen to M. Desfriches. Chardin's work moved through phases without sharp breaks: still life first, then domestic interior scenes, then portraiture in pastel late in life. His picture "The Skate," shown in 1728 at the Exposition de la Jeunesse in the Place Dauphine, drew notice, with M. Largillière mistaking it for Dutch work. He exhibited at the Louvre for forty years, serving twenty of them as a hanger. His still-life paintings, such as the "Goblet d'Argent" and a brown jewel-box with pale-blue silk lining, both in the Salle Lacaze, show mastery of reflected light and color, rendering humble kitchen objects and, later, the finer appointments of the well-to-do with equal fidelity. In 1734 he produced his first genre picture, of a woman sealing a letter, beginning decades of depicting bourgeois domestic life: works like "Le Bénédicité," "La Mère Laborieuse," "L'Économe," and "La Bonne Éducation." His figures, children, young women, and elders alike, combined typicality with personal accuracy, avoiding both Hogarth's harshness and Morland's idealization. From 1738 to 1757, engravers including Laurent Cars, Lépicié, Surugue, and Le Bas translated his work into widely sold prints, spreading his reputation among the educated middle class. Diderot and other contemporary critics praised him, Lafont de St. Yonne in 1746, the Abbé le Blanc in 1753, and Diderot repeatedly, though by 1767 Diderot lamented that Chardin was repeating himself and losing favor. In his final decade, Chardin turned to pastel portraiture, inspired by Quentin Latour's success in that medium, and regained some public attention, painting a portrait of his second wife described as embodying "philosophy" at forty. After his death his reputation fell into neglect, with some pictures left unregarded around the Paris quays, and it was only in recent decades (per the text's 1885 vantage) that renewed appreciation of his work began.

By Frederick Wedmore · First published 1899 · Genre: Art History, Biography, Art Criticism · 3,927 words

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Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin -- a man of the _bourgeoisie_, as original as Hogarth -- was born on the 2nd November 1699. It was in Paris, in the quarter of St. Sulpice, in the trading quarter where shopkeepers and skilled artisans wait on the wants of the neighbouring Faubourg St. Germain. He was of humble, decent parentage, as befitted the place; and he had for godmother, when he was christened, one Anne Bourgine, wife of Jacques Riche, who declared herself unable to sign her name in attestation of the event. Chardin's father was a cabinet-maker; a dexterous craftsman, with a speciality which, along with such honour as it afforded, he passed on to one of his sons. He made, as Chardin's best biographer has told us, ‘ces billards monumentaux dont une planche de Bonnart nous a gardé le dessin,' and he made them for the King. But though he worked successfully and well, the burden of a family weighed on his fortunes, and his thought about his children was chiefly that they might find means of support. Chardin was given little education, and he was to have followed his father's trade, but he showed, in his quite early youth, enough of promise as a painter for it to be held reasonable that he should enter M. Cazes' painting-room. Cazes was not at this time an unknown artist, but Chardin learned almost nothing from him. The inventor of a _genre_, Chardin must needs be his own best teacher. Time and his own individuality alone could allow him his sturdy facility of touch. Only in working for himself could he acquire the schemes of colour, the tones, the delicate justice of expression, for which we admire him to-day. And if he was already independent of a master in the selection of his method, still more his own was his choice of the world which he observed to record.

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Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin · eighteenth-century painter · French painter · Paris · still-life painting · genre painting · domestic scenes · pastel portraiture · bourgeois life · everyday subjects · humble beauty · domestic labor

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