Chardin by Frederick Wedmore — Read

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.

That world, of which Chardin has given us so veracious yet so poetic a chronicle, was indeed the world of his daily life. His art concerned itself with the familiar pursuits of the lower middle class, homely because it was bound to be frugal, but refined because it was French. The grosser manners which reflected accurately -- as manner is wont to do -- the duller thoughts of our English lower middle class of a hundred years since, would never have afforded to an artist who desired inspiration from that class alone, such an opportunity as was offered to Chardin by the lower _bourgeoisie_ of France. The ruder civilisation of the London of that period provoked from English art no such exquisite transcript. And had it come, it could hardly have been welcomed, for in the two countries the taste of the day was different -- the one was finer than the other. A similarity in coarseness, in imaginative Literature -- the unquestioned grossness of Rétif de la Bretonne, placed by the side of the grossness of Smollett -- may seem to deny it. But pictorial art makes the contrast evident. In France it was possible not only for Chardin to exist, but for him to be valued.