Chardin (1699-1779)

The exhibition opens with still lifes from the second half of the 1720s, including the celebrated painting The Ray, on loan from the Louvre. It was Chardin’s entry piece into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris but the artist was only admitted in the lesser category of “Painter of animals and fruit”. At this point he broadened his areas of interest and introduced the motif of live animals in his paintings, as can be seen in the two canvases from the Museo Thyssen on display in this section: Cat with a Piece of Salmon and Cat with a Rayfish.

The next section opens with still lifes from the 1730s, including A green-necked Duck hanging on the Wall and a bitter Orange, and Still Life with a Porcelain Vessel and two Herrings suspended by pieces of Straw from a Nail in front of a Niche. Shown next, and also from this decade, are three examples from the celebrated Soap Bubbles series. Chardin worked in a variety of genres, never completely abandoning one in order to take up another and was continually inventive within all of them. He would also frequently return to earlier themes and simultaneously work on different paintings at the same time. In the 1730s, and influenced by 17th-century Dutch painting, the artist turned his attention to genre scenes. Chardin masterfully conveyed the meditative mood of his figures and the serene dignity of simple domestic tasks, while his stylistic evolution is clearly evident in these works. His brushstroke becomes more vaporous and the soft tonality heralds the pastels of his final years. In addition, he abandoned his use of models from the humbler social classes to focus on the bourgeois circle of his second wife. It was works such as The young School Teacher, seen here in three versions that have been brought together for the first time, Boy with a Top, and Girl with a Shuttlecock, that would bring Chardin true popularity in the second half of the 19th century.

The exhibition then turns to works from the 1750s and 1760s and to the artist’s return to the still life, a genre that he had almost completely abandoned. These compositions are clearly different to the works of the 1720s due to the presence of a greater variety and number of types of game, species of fruit and objects (costly pieces of porcelain and sophisticated glass ware). Among works from this period in the exhibition are the delightful Basket of wild Strawberries, Glass of Water and Coffee Pot, and Bouquet of Carnations, Tuberoses and Sweet Peas in a white porcelain Vase with a blue Pattern, the latter a masterpiece loaned by the National Gallery of Scotland. Works such of this type reveal a more agile, smoother type of brushstroke and also demonstrate the artist’s interest in painting reflections, transparent effects, light and shadow.

The exhibition ends with two pastel portraits, the medium to which Chardin turned after he was obliged to abandon oil painting due to failing health and which provoked great surprise at the 1771 Salon. These pastels reveal Chardin’s confidence in his own powers and mark the end of his artistic career.

Chardin was born and died in Paris, spending all his life there and rarely leaving the city. Of humble social origins, he initially trained as a craftsman, a fact that influenced his painting and is evident in the combination of minute detail and freedom that characterises his works. Chardin painted slowly, in quest of perfection, and his output was relatively small as a result. He trained with the history painter Pierre-Jacques Cazes and with Nöel-Nicolas Coypel. In 1728 the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture acknowledged his talents and accepted him on the basis of The Ray and The Sideboard in the lesser category of painter “in the skill of animals and fruit”.

Some years later Chardin started to produce “genre paintings”. These small-format works depicting scenes of everyday life made use of a bourgeois, moralistic viewpoint to offer a sociological study of the figures. Notable within this category are two works in the exhibition: The Blessing and The diligent Mother, both of which brought the artist enormous famous, partly through their reproduction in the form of prints by Charles-Nicholas Cochin the Elder (1688-1754) that circulated throughout Europe. Other examples of this type are the three versions of Soap Bubbles, loaned to the exhibition from US institutions.

Chardin never abandoned one genre in order to take up another, but from the 1750s onwards he produced fewer genre scenes and turned back to the still lifes of his early career. Examples of these later still lifes include Basket of wild Strawberries, Glass of Water and Coffee Pot, and Bouquet of Carnations, Tuberoses and Sweet Peas in a white Porcelain Vase with a blue Pattern, all to be seen in the exhibition.

Chardin’s final works are pastel portraits, of which two from a private collection are included in the exhibition.

Chardin’s clients were Parisian aristocrats, connoisseurs and friends who were artists. In addition, his great princely and royal patrons included Louis XV of France, Catherine II of Russia and Louisa Ulrika of Prussia, Queen of Sweden.

“I make use of colours but I paint with sentiment”, Chardin himself said of his way of painting. The result was works that are very different to those of the other French painters of the 18th century such as Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard or David. The artist described how he focused on the objects in his still lifes: “I have to forget everything that I have seen and even the way that others have depicted these motifs.”

In the words of the exhibition’s curator, Pierre Rosenberg, Honorary Director of the Louvre and the leading expert on Chardin: “If I had to define his still lifes in a single word, that word would be ‘silence´”. And indeed it is this palpable silence in Chardin’s still lifes that differentiate them from the work of most of the other leading painters in that genre, which had traditionally been considered a minor one and whose recognition in the 18th century favoured the development of Chardin’s highly distinctive style.

Chardin enjoyed success in his own lifetime, while later artists such as Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Morandi and Lucien Freud considered him their master.