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JENA BAPTISTE SIMEON CHARDIN

(1699-1779)

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By general consent, Jean Siméon Chardin was one of the supreme artists of
the eighteenth century and probably the greatest master of still life in the history of
painting. Yet there has never been a full dress retrospective of his work, and to
mark the 200th anniversary of his death, at the age of eighty in 1779, a huge
Chardin show has opened in Paris [review dates from 1979]. Organized by Pierre
Rosenberg of the Louvre, it is the kind of exhibit that assigns the Tuts and
Pompeiis to the category of show biz trivia where they belong.

To see Chardin's work en masse, in the midst of a period stuffed with every kind of
jerky innovation, narcissistic blurting and trashy "relevance," is to be reminded that
lucidity, deliberation, probity and calm are still the chief virtues of the art of painting.
Chardin has long been a painter's painter, studied and when his work was cheap,
coIlected by other artists. He deeply affected at least three of the founders of
modern art, Cezanne, Matisse and Braque. Van Gogh compared his depth to
Rembrandt's. What seized them in his work was not the humility of his subject
matter so much as its ambition as pure painting. The mediation between the eye
and the world that Chardin's canvases propose is inexhaustible.

Were he judged merely as a social recorder, he would not have a special place in
art history. One does not need to be a historian to know how narrow his field of
social vision was. He ignored the public ostentation of his time, as well as the
private misery. Most of his paintings are condensed sonnets in praise of the middle
path, idealizing the sober life of the Parisian petite bourgeoisie as embodied in his
own household. He is said to have had a chirpy sense of humor, and there is
certainly a sly irony in his singeries, or monkey paintings, in which hairy little
parodies of man play at being painters and connoisseurs.

But of social criticism there is no trace. The nurse in Meal for a Convalescent, who
stands opening a boiled egg in a kind of reverential silence like a secular
descendant of Georges de La Tour's saints, is not a representative of the class
war; the efforts of some historians to see Chardin's servants as emblems of an
oppressed proletariat on the eve of the French Revolution are simply beside the
point. A sense of social precariousness is the last thing one could expect to meet in
a Chardin. Indeed, one can hardly imagine him working without the conviction that
his way of life was immutable - that there would always be nurses to make beef
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tea, scullions to bargain for chickens, and governesses to scold the children; that
the kitchen skimmers and casseroles and spice pots that he so often painted were
in some important sense as durable as the Maison Carrée or the Colosseum.

He did not travel for nourishment. Apart from trips to Versailles, Chardin may not
have left Paris once in his life. He was entirely a metropolitan man, and this fact
seems oddly at variance with his paintings, since, as Pierre Rosenberg remarks,
"one would like to imagine Chardin a solitary individual, a provincial."

Chardin's prolonged meditation on brown crockery and the matted fur of dead
hares took place in the midst of an efflorescence of luxury art - pink bodies, swirling
fronds of gold ornament, rinsed allegorical skies: the Rococo style in all its Gallic
glory. It pervaded his milieu, and he did not despise it, but it was quite alien to his
temperament. What he craved was neither luxury nor the high rhetoric of history
painting, but apprehensible truth, visible, familiar, open to touch and repetition. The
truth about an onion could be tested again and again. The truth about a Versailles
shepherdess was, to put it mildly, more labile.

His love of truth and nature endeared him to advanced thinkers in France, the
encyclopédistes in Denis Diderot's circle. Detecting a moral value in Chardin that
was lacking in Boucher, Diderot became his chief intellectual supporter. "It is the
business of art," he argued in 1765, "to touch and to move, and to do this by
getting close to nature." Chardin epitomized that ambition at work: "Welcome back,
great magician, with your mute compositions! How eloquently they speak to the
artist! How much they tell him about the representation of Nature, the science of
color and harmony! How freely the air flows around these objects!"

Few painters have ever had such a press as the one that, interrupted by a few
decades of posthumous neglect, greeted Chardin from Diderot, the Goncourt
brothers, Gide, Proust and dozens of others. And what is rarer, their praise was
deserved. Chardin had two remarkable gifts. The first was his ability to absorb
himself in the visual to the point of selfeffacement. Now and again, as in his Basket
of Wild Strawberries - a glowing red cone, compressing the effulgence of a volcano
onto the kitchen table, balanced by two white carnations and the cold, silvery
transparencies of a water glass - the sense of rapture is delivered almost before
the painting is grasped.

But the fervor of this image, almost literally a contrast of fire and ice, is
comparatively rare in Chardin's output. Generally his still lifes declare themselves
more slowly. One needs to savor his Jar of Apricots, for instance, before
discovering its resonances, which are not only visual but tactile: how the tambour
lid of the round box accords with the oval shape of the canvas itself and is echoed
by the drumlike tightness of the paper tied over the apricot jar; how the horizontal
axis of the table is played upon by the stuttering line of red wineglass, fruit, painted

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fruit on the coffee cups; how the slab of bread repeats the rectangular form of the
packet on the right, with its cunningly placed strings; and how all these rhymes of
shape and format are reinforced by the subtle interchange of color and reflection
among the objects, the warm paste of Chardin's paint holding an infinite series of
correspondences.

It is as though Chardin extended his ideal of the family to include groups of objects
as well as people. The props of his still lifes, which were also the normal
appurtenances of his home life, become like familiar faces: the patriarchal mass of
his copper water urn, raised on a squat tripod; a white teapot with a rakish finial;
the painted china that signified his growing prosperity; and so on down to the last
stoneware daubiére, all signifying a world into which the eye could move without
alienation or strain.

This patient construction, this sense of the intrinsic worth of seeing, combines with
Chardin's second gift: his feeling for the poetic moments of human gesture (rather
than the didactic ones, as in Greuze). It permeates his genre scenes and portraits,
especially the portraits of children; the gentle muteness Diderot perceived turns
into a noble ineloquence, as though Piero della Francesca were visiting the house.
Chardin's absorption in the act of painting paralleled the absorption of children in
their games, which he painted. One has only to look at the figure in his portrait
Little Girl with Shuttlecock - the expressionless face and white shoulders sitting on
the stiff bodice like ice cream on its cone; the sequence of forms pinned together
by accents of blue on her cap, her dress, her scissors ribbon and the feathers of
her shuttlecock - to realize the truth of Rosenberg's insight: "The world that Chardin
imposes on his figures is a closed world, a stopped world ... a world at rest, a world
of 'infinite duration.'" Rarely, in painting after Chardin, would one find this blend of
intimacy and decorum.

- From Robert Hughes, "Nothing If Not Critical"