Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (born November 2, 1699, Paris, France—died December 6, 1779, Paris) was a French painter of still lifes and domestic scenes remarkable for their intimate realism and tranquil atmosphere and the luminous quality of their paint. For his still lifes, he chose humble objects (The Buffet, 1728) and for his genre paintings modest events (Woman Sealing a Letter, 1733). He also executed some fine portraits, especially the pastels of his last years.

Born in Paris, Chardin never really left his native quarter of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Little is known about his training, although he worked for a time with the artists Pierre-Jacques Cazes and Noël-Nicolas Coypel. In 1724 he was admitted to the Academy of Saint Luc. His true career, however, did not begin until 1728 when, thanks to the portrait painter Nicolas de Largillière (1656–1746), he became a member of the Royal Academy of Painting, to which he offered The Skate and The Buffet.

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In 1731 Chardin married Marguerite Saintard, and two years later he unveiled the first of his figure paintings, Woman Sealing a Letter. From then on Chardin alternated between paintings of la vie silencieuse (“the silent life”) or scenes of family life such as Saying Grace and half-figure paintings of young men and women concentrating on their work or play, such as Young Man Drawing and Child with Top. The artist repeated his subject matter, and there are often several original versions of the same composition. Chardin’s wife died in 1735, and the estate inventory drawn up after her death reveals a certain affluence, suggesting that by this time Chardin had become a successful painter.

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In 1740 he was presented to Louis XV, to whom he offered Mother Working and Saying Grace. Four years later he married Marguerite Pouget, whom he was to immortalize 30 years later in a pastel. These were the years when Chardin was at the height of his fame. Louis XV, for example, paid 1,500 livres for Lady with a Bird-Organ. Chardin continued to rise steadily on the rungs of the traditional academic career. His colleagues at the academy entrusted him, first unofficially (1755), then officially (1761), with the hanging of the paintings in the Salon (official exhibition of the academy), which had been held regularly every two years since 1737 and in which Chardin had participated faithfully. It was in the exercise of his official duties that he met the encyclopaedist and philosopher Denis Diderot, who would devote some of his finest pages of art criticism to Chardin, the “grand magicien” that he admired so much.

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.”

He was nearer to the feeling of meditative quiet that animates the rustic scenes of the 17th-century French master Louis Le Nain than to the spirit of light and superficial brilliance seen in the work of many of his contemporaries. His carefully constructed still lifes do not bulge with appetizing foods but are concerned with the objects themselves and with the treatment of light. In his genre scenes he does not seek his models among the peasantry as his predecessors did; he paints the petite bourgeoisie of Paris. But manners have been softened, and his models seem to be far removed from Le Nain’s austere peasants. The housewives of Chardin are simply but neatly dressed, and the same cleanliness is visible in the houses where they live. Everywhere a sort of intimacy and good fellowship constitute the charm of these modestly scaled pictures of domestic life that are akin in feeling and format to the works of Johannes Vermeer.

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Despite the triumphs of his early and middle life, Chardin’s last years were clouded, both in his private life and in his career. His only son, Pierre-Jean, who had received the Grand Prix (prize to study art in Rome) of the academy in 1754, committed suicide in Venice in 1767. And then too, the public’s taste had changed. The new director of the academy, the all-powerful Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre, in his desire to restore historical painting to the first rank, humiliated the old artist by reducing his pension and gradually divesting him of his duties at the academy. Furthermore, Chardin’s sight was failing. He tried his hand at drawing with pastels. It was a new medium for him and less taxing on his eyes. Those pastels, most of which are in the Louvre Museum, are highly regarded now, but they were not widely admired in Chardin’s own time. In fact, he lived out the remainder of his life in almost total obscurity, his work meeting with indifference.

It was not until the middle of the 19th century that he was rediscovered by a handful of French critics, including the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and collectors (the Lavalard brothers, for example, who donated their collection of Chardins to the Museum of Picardy in Amiens). The Louvre made its first acquisitions of his work in the 1860s. Today Chardin is considered the greatest still-life painter of the 18th century, and his canvases are coveted by the world’s most distinguished museums and collectors.