Jean-Siméon Chardin

French painter

• Born: November 2, 1699
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: December 6, 1779
• Place of death: Paris, France

Perhaps the greatest French painter of the eighteenth century, Chardin drew his inspiration from the Dutch masters and the simple world of the Paris bourgeoisie that he knew so well. Yet he was not celebrated only as a genre painter—a painter of daily life. Many of the techniques that he employed both in his oils and in his pastels would be adopted and developed by generations of painters.

Early Life

Jean-Siméon Chardin (zhahn see-may-ohn shawr-dan) was the eldest surviving son of Jean and Jeanne Françoise David Chardin. He was baptized at the church of Saint Sulpice the following day, and he lived his entire life in the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Près. His father was a master cabinet maker whose specialty was billiard tables, and one of his patrons was the king of France. Anxious to provide each of his children with a proper livelihood, the elder Chardin tried to persuade his namesake to train to take his place, but Jean would have none of it. His first love was art.

With reluctance Jean’s father agreed to his son’s choice of a career, but he did not understand the importance of the course of study pursued by aspiring artists. Without being consulted, young Jean was sent in 1718 to study with Pierre-Jacques Cazes, who was a professor at the Royal Academy but in all respects an inferior teacher. Cazes was so poor that he could not afford to hire models; instead, his students were forced to copy his sketches. Luckily, two years later, Chardin was able to leave the studio of Cazes to become the assistant of Noël-Nicolas Coypel, from whom he learned to paint directly from nature. There was always a refreshing spontaneity in Chardin’s art, a quality not often found in the work of many of his contemporaries, who usually painted from sketches.

In 1723, Chardin fell in love with Marguerite Saintard, a young woman whose family included prosperous lawyers and minor government officials; against all odds, she accepted his proposal of marriage. The contract was drawn up that same year, and the elder Chardin, conscious that his family would soon improve its social status, once again took charge of his son’s life. Without his knowledge or permission, the aspiring young painter’s name was submitted for membership in the Academy of St. Luke in 1724. More a guild than an assembly of artists, this once-proud organization was the refuge of men whose talents placed them in the second rank. While his father’s action was the result of ignorance of the hierarchy of the arts, Chardin was faced with the difficult task of bringing his talents to the attention of those who could advance his career.

Each summer, during the morning hours of Corpus Christi Day, young artists who were not members of the Royal Academy were allowed to exhibit their works in the Place Dauphine. On June 20, 1728, Chardin showed a number of his paintings, all of them in the lowest category sanctioned by the academy. Since he had little formal education or training, he might not aspire to paint historical or religious subjects, but he could perfect his mastery of the still life. His bid for recognition was successful; on September 25, 1728, he was admitted to membership in the Royal Academy as a painter skilled in animals and fruits. The following year, he resigned from the Academy of St. Luke.

Life’s Work

Despite his admission to the Royal Academy at the lowest level of membership, Jean-Siméon Chardin was a loyal member until his death. Although he failed in his attempt to gain an assistant professorship, he considered the academy to be extremely valuable as a teaching institution for the training of young artists. He regularly attended its meetings and exhibited at its salons. By the time of his marriage in February, 1731, to Marguerite Saintard, Chardin was already popular with critics and the public alike for his still lifes, which sold for modest prices but were always in demand. Some even called him the French Rembrandt. Yet it was his technique that set him apart from his contemporaries and earned for him his special niche in the history of art.

From the study of the works of the Dutch and Flemish masters, which were available in numerous engravings, Chardin developed the same fascination for the effects of light on objects in nature that made the work of the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer so exciting. Some even mistook Chardin’s works for those of a Flemish painter. As he began to paint genre canvases, he often borrowed themes and compositions familiar in the works of the northern painters, but he achieved a freshness and originality that gave his work a special character. Always true to nature, Chardin nevertheless painted objects and figures according to his special vision. He rearranged his subjects to suit his exploration of the mysteries of light. Chardin placed his paints on canvas in a manner unlike any other artist of his day. Often he applied them rather thickly and blended his colors into one another with a subtlety that made it difficult to discern the subject of a painting when viewed at close range. When regarded at a distance, however, the various elements of his composition were easily recognizable.

Chardin’s father died in the summer of 1731, and on November 18 of that year, Chardin’s son Pierre-Jean was born. Two years later, on August 3, daughter Marguerite-Agnes was baptized. As his family grew, so did Chardin’s reputation. The French ambassador to Spain commissioned two paintings, and in June, 1734, sixteen of his works were exhibited at the Exposition of Young Artists. His personal life, like one of his canvases, was a mixture of light and shadow. In April, 1735, at the age of thirty-eight, Marguerite Saintard Chardin died after a long illness. It is interesting to note that no painting bears the date 1735, a year of grief for Chardin, who always sought to reassure his public of the basic goodness of human existence through his art. By 1737, when he exhibited eight paintings at the salon of the Royal Academy, he had lost his daughter also. Some of his personal loss must have been assuaged by his professional success; his works were now appearing in engravings, and the circle of his admirers was growing ever wider.

He had no rival in the area of still life, but in the realm of genre painting there were several artists whose works were widely respected. To compete with them for the public’s attention, Chardin had to develop a new approach to this category of art. Working with a rather narrow palette of soft and muted tones, he created works in which the composition was the central theme and the actual subject matter often secondary. These were works that appealed to artists, to connoisseurs such as the king of Prussia, the queen of Sweden, and King Louis XV of France, who obtained two Chardin canvases in 1740 for his collection. Because he devoted so much effort to perfecting a composition, Chardin often copied his earlier paintings at the request of patrons, giving him a lucrative and steady source of income for a man who only worked on one painting at a time. Since he was dealing with a familiar composition, he could work faster than normal.

Within the structure of the Royal Academy, Chardin’s activities increased as his reputation grew. He was appointed in 1739 to a committee responsible for keeping accounts and assessing taxes. His expertise in finance eventually led to his appointment as the first treasurer of the Royal Academy in 1755. He was promoted in 1743 to the post of adviser to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Five years later, Chardin served on a committee to examine the pictures at the academy salon. His diligent service, broken only by a six-month illness in 1742, earned for him the recommendation of an annual grant, in 1752, and living quarters in the Louvre, in 1757. Just as his professional life reached this zenith, his private life was filled with trouble and tragedy.

A modest inheritance passed to Chardin at his mother’s death in 1743, which enabled him to marry, on November 26, 1744, Françoise Marguerite Pouget, a wealthy widow. The following October, their daughter Angélique-Françoise was born, and the Chardins settled down to a comfortable life. Chardin also took pride in the progress of his son Pierre-Jean, who showed a remarkable talent for painting. Pierre-Jean received all the advantages and opportunities that had been denied his father. In April, 1754, while studying to be a painter of historical subjects, the highest level of achievement in the Royal Academy, he was allowed to compete for the academy’s grand prize, which he won in August. Three more years of work with the best teachers earned for Pierre-Jean Chardin the chance to study at the French Academy in Rome. He left Paris in December, 1757, and died in Venice ten years later under mysterious circumstances. During that stormy decade, he wasted his opportunities, caused a scandal among the members of the French community in Rome with his outrageous behavior, was captured briefly by pirates in 1762, and publicly accused his father of cheating him out of his inheritance.

From scenes of domestic life, Chardin turned to portraits, but they were not well received by the critics; at the end of his career, he therefore returned to the still life. In 1755, he had taken charge of hanging the pictures at the annual academy salon for a friend who was ill; the task was awarded to Chardin permanently in 1761. It was a duty he enjoyed, and one that gave him great power over his fellow artists. A painter’s reputation could be enhanced or damaged by the placement of his works at the salon. Chardin became well known for his fairness and tact. As the years passed, Chardin continued to paint and to attend faithfully to his duties at the academy, but increasingly the critics relegated him to the past, a pleasant old anachronism. They were wrong. At the very end of his life, Chardin discovered another area of artistic endeavor, the pastel. When his first pastel portraits appeared in the salon of 1771, they caused a sensation. Suffering from gallstones and plagued with failing eyesight, he continued to work until his death from edema on December 6, 1779.

Significance

The art of Jean-Siméon Chardin moved through a few phases: from his mastery of the still life as a young man, to the charming pictures of domestic harmony and the artistically correct portraits of his mature years, and finally to the sensitive pastels at the end of his life. Yet the subjects that consumed six decades of creativity are unimportant when compared to the techniques that Chardin developed. Often he regretted that he had not received the training provided by the Royal Academy; yet that omission allowed him to explore the full measure of his media and to maintain his creativity in the face of the potentially stifling rules and regulations of the academy.

Chardin was inspired by the art of the Netherlands, by the subject matter, by the palette, and by the techniques of the Dutch and Flemish masters. He was particularly fascinated by the effects of light on nature. The object, whether animate or inanimate, was of little importance to Chardin; it was the light and the shadow that motivated him. In nearly every canvas he painted, Chardin dealt with his fascination with light and the problems it might cause the artist. He painted objects as they appeared to him, not as they necessarily were. Chardin sought to portray the essence of his subjects, not their reality. In this respect, he was the precursor of Impressionism. Many of his contemporaries did not understand or appreciate his art; it remained for their children’s children to rediscover Chardin’s fresh and original approach to the painter’s craft.

Genre painting, the celebration of the simple life, had long enjoyed a popularity among all classes, but especially the bourgeoisie. Too often, however, scenes of domestic life possessed a cloying charm. Chardin gave genre painting dignity. He seemed to prefer the most commonplace subjects, but he gave them a timelessness by carefully divorcing them from contemporary events or definite fashions. The men, women, and children who people his canvases are more symbols than personalities. They are suspended in time and space, captives of the same light that held Chardin spellbound. He was not a revolutionary; his celebration of bourgeois life was not political in its intent. He simply painted what was readily at hand. His muted colors and delicate contrasts were the palette of one who adored the subtle loveliness that lay all around him, but particularly in simple things. For more than fifty years, Chardin was a member of the Royal Academy, for nineteen its treasurer. In the last analysis, however, he was the servant of beauty.

Bibliography

Chikamatsu, Colin B., Philip Conisbee, and Thomas W. Gaehtgens. The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. Catalog of an exhibition of 113 paintings that were first displayed at the National Gallery of Canada in 2003. Includes essays that explore the development of genre painting and examine paintings by Chardin and other eighteenth century French artists.

Conisbee, Philip. Chardin. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1986. Perhaps the most complete treatment of Chardin and his contribution to the art of painting in eighteenth century France. The quality of the plates is quite good, and in a number of cases the reader is able to examine specific details of some of Chardin’s more important works.

De la Mare, Walter. Chardin, 1699-1779. New York: Pitman, 1950. While only ten of Chardin’s most famous domestic scenes are featured in this slender volume, it is nevertheless of interest because of the excellent essay and notes by de la Mare. The whole work is not merely informative; it is beautifully written as well. One of the best introductions to Chardin and his work.

Furst, Herbert E. A. Chardin. London: Methuen, 1911. While the style of this work is dated, this volume is an excellent treatment of the life and work of Chardin. The author obviously has a great admiration for Chardin, not only as an artist but also as a man; it is this quality of sensitivity that makes this book worthwhile.

Kalnein, Wend Graf, and Michael Levey. Art and Architecture of the Eighteenth Century in France. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1972. Very useful as an introduction to the main events in the painter’s life as well as to the elements of his style. More important, Chardin is placed in the context of his time, and his contemporaries in all the arts are given the same thorough and scholarly treatment.

Roberts, Warren. Morality and Social Class in Eighteenth-Century French Literature and Painting. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1974. Chardin’s works are examined in the light of the society in which they were produced. Roberts views Chardin’s representations of bourgeois domestic life as the antithesis of the bedroom art that was so popular among some members of the French aristocracy. Chardin is viewed not as a political revolutionary but as the perfect representative of his class.

Roland Michel, Marianne. Chardin. Translated by Eithne McCarthy. New York: Abrams, 1996. A thorough biography by a French art historian and gallery director, including updated information about Chardin’s life and paintings. Contains almost 300 illustrations.

Rosenberg, Pierre. Chardin, 1699-1779. Translated by Emilie P. Kadish and Ursula Korneitchouk. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1979. Although this work is essentially a catalog of a remarkable exhibit of Chardin’s works, it contains a tremendous amount of biographical and historical data useful to the student of the period. Each of the artist’s works is described. Contains notes and a bibliography for each work. The general bibliography is also extremely valuable.

Schwarz, Michael. The Age of the Rococo. Translated by Gerald Onn. New York: Praeger, 1971. This remarkably well-translated version of an earlier German work is extremely valuable because it examines the various types of painting that flourished in the eighteenth century, not only in France but also throughout Western Europe. The treatment of Chardin and his work is balanced.

Wildenstein, Georges. Chardin. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. Rev. ed. Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1969. The essay that begins this revised edition of Wildenstein’s 1933 work is an excellent introduction to the life and work of Chardin. Also useful are the chronology that precedes the superb collection of plates—both in color and in black and white—and the catalog of Chardin’s work, which is divided according to subject.