Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin
The quiet master of everyday life.
Chardin painted still lifes and simple everyday scenes with kitchen utensils, fruit and children. His pictures are quiet and dignified amid the whirl of the Rococo.
Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin was born in Paris in 1699. His father was a cabinetmaker who, among other things, made billiard tables for the king. Chardin received no classical education and never travelled to Italy, which was unusual for a French painter. He trained with history painters but soon found his own path in small subjects that the Academy regarded as lowly: dead animals, fruit and kitchen objects.
In 1728 he was elected to the French Academy as a painter of “animals and fruit”. His reception pieces, The Ray and The Buffet, are both in the Louvre in Paris. The Ray shows a gutted fish hanging on a wall, both repellent and fascinating. In the 1730s Chardin began to paint people in everyday life: maidservants, mothers and children playing or blowing soap bubbles. Saying Grace (1740), in which a mother has the children pray before a meal, was presented to Louis XV and is in the Louvre. The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm owns several of his finest works, among them The Washerwoman and The Morning Toilet. They were bought as early as the 18th century by the Swedish diplomat Carl Gustaf Tessin.
Chardin painted slowly and carefully. He applied the paint in many thin and thick layers so that the surface becomes soft and granular. Close up the brushstrokes look almost disorderly, but from a distance they merge into objects that seem to glow from within. The colours are muted: brown, green, grey and cream tones. His scenes lack drama. Instead they convey stillness, concentration and respect for ordinary work.
Chardin had a long career within the Academy. He was its treasurer and for many years was responsible for hanging the pictures at the great Salons in the Louvre. The philosopher Denis Diderot wrote rapturously about his paintings. Towards the end of his life he developed problems with his eyes and turned to pastel. His self-portrait with spectacles and headscarf from the 1770s is among the best-known pastels in the Louvre. He died in Paris in 1779.
After his death Chardin was forgotten for a time, but in the 19th century he was rediscovered. Manet and Cézanne admired his still lifes, and the writer Marcel Proust wrote about them. Many later painters have seen him as a model for how simple objects can become great art.