Jean Siméon Chardin

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Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
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Jean Siméon Chardin
Self-portrait, 1771, pastel, Louvre
Born(1699-11-02)2 November 1699
Rue de Seine, Paris, France
Died6 December 1779(1779-12-06) (aged 80)
Louvre, Paris, France
Resting placeSaint-Germain l'Auxerrois
NationalityFrench
EducationPierre-Jacques Cazes, Noël-Nicolas Coypel, Académie de Saint-Luc
Known forPainting: still life and genre
Notable work
MovementBaroque, Rococo
Patron(s)Louis XV

Jean Siméon Chardin (French:

genre paintings which depict kitchen maids, children, and domestic activities. Carefully balanced composition, soft diffusion of light, and granular impasto
characterize his work.

Life

Chardin was born in

Saint-Sulpice until 1757, when Louis XV granted him a studio and living quarters in the Louvre.[4]

Chardin entered into a marriage contract with Marguerite Saintard in 1723, whom he did not marry until 1731.[5] He served apprenticeships with the history painters Pierre-Jacques Cazes and Noël-Nicolas Coypel, and in 1724 became a master in the Académie de Saint-Luc.

According to one nineteenth-century writer, at a time when it was hard for unknown painters to come to the attention of the Royal Academy, he first found notice by displaying a painting at the "small Corpus Christi" (held eight days after the regular one) on the Place Dauphine (by the Pont Neuf). Van Loo, passing by in 1720, bought it and later assisted the young painter.[6]

Self Portrait at an Easel (ca. 1779), pastel, 40.5 x 32.5 cm., Louvre

Upon presentation of The Ray and The Buffet in 1728, he was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture.[7] The following year he ceded his position in the Académie de Saint-Luc. He made a modest living by "produc[ing] paintings in the various genres at whatever price his customers chose to pay him",[8] and by such work as the restoration of the frescoes at the Galerie François I at Fontainebleau in 1731.[9]

In November 1731 his son Jean-Pierre was baptized, and a daughter, Marguerite-Agnès, was baptized in 1733. In 1735 his wife Marguerite died, and within two years Marguerite-Agnès had died as well.[5]

Beginning in 1737 Chardin exhibited regularly at the Salon. He would prove to be a "dedicated academician",[4] regularly attending meetings for fifty years, and functioning successively as counsellor, treasurer, and secretary, overseeing in 1761 the installation of Salon exhibitions.[10]

Françoise-Marguerite Pouget (1707–1791), 2nd wife of Chardin (1775), pastel, 46 x 38 cm., Louvre

Chardin's work gained popularity through reproductive engravings of his

genre paintings (made by artists such as François-Bernard Lépicié and P.-L. Sugurue), which brought Chardin income in the form of "what would now be called royalties".[11]
In 1744 he entered his second marriage, this time to Françoise-Marguerite Pouget. The union brought a substantial improvement in Chardin's financial circumstances. In 1745 a daughter, Angélique-Françoise, was born, but she died in 1746.

In 1752 Chardin was granted a pension of 500

pastels, a medium in which he executed portraits of his wife and himself (see Self-portrait at top right). His works in pastels are now highly valued.[15]

In 1772 Chardin's son, also a painter, drowned in Venice, a probable suicide.[14] The artist's last known oil painting was dated 1776; his final Salon participation was in 1779, and featured several pastel studies. Gravely ill by November of that year, he died in Paris on December 6, at the age of 80.

Work

Jar of Apricots (1758), oil on canvas, 57 x 51 cm., Art Gallery of Ontario
The Sliced Melon (1760), oil on canvas, 57 x 52 cm., Louvre

Chardin worked very slowly and painted only slightly more than 200 pictures (about four a year) in total.[16]

Chardin's work had little in common with the

genre paintings
. Simple, even stark, paintings of common household items (Still Life with a Smoker's Box) and an uncanny ability to portray children's innocence in an unsentimental manner (Boy with a Top [right]) nevertheless found an appreciative audience in his time, and account for his timeless appeal.

Largely self-taught, Chardin was greatly influenced by the realism and subject matter of the 17th-century

Le Bénédicité, and kitchen maids in moments of reflection. These humble scenes deal with simple, everyday activities, yet they also have functioned as a source of documentary information about a level of French society not hitherto considered a worthy subject for painting.[19] The pictures are noteworthy for their formal structure and pictorial harmony.[4] Chardin said about painting, "Who said one paints with colors? One employs colors, but one paints with feeling."[20]

A child playing was a favourite subject of Chardin. He depicted an adolescent building a house of cards on at least four occasions. The version at Waddesdon Manor is the most elaborate. Scenes such as these derived from 17th-century Netherlandish vanitas works, which bore messages about the transitory nature of human life and the worthlessness of material ambitions, but Chardin's also display a delight in the ephemeral phases of childhood for their own sake.[21]

Chardin frequently painted replicas of his compositions—especially his genre paintings, nearly all of which exist in multiple versions which in many cases are virtually indistinguishable.[22] Beginning with The Governess (1739, in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), Chardin shifted his attention from working-class subjects to slightly more spacious scenes of bourgeois life.[23] Chardin's extant paintings, which number about 200,[8] are in many major museums, including the Louvre.

Influence

Enameled box and other objects painted after the style of Chardin

Chardin's influence on the art of the modern era was wide-ranging and has been well-documented.

National Gallery, London).[27]

Marcel Proust, in the chapter "How to open your eyes?" from In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), describes a melancholic young man sitting at his simple breakfast table. The only comfort he finds is in the imaginary ideas of beauty depicted in the great masterpieces of the Louvre, materializing fancy palaces, rich princes, and the like. The author tells the young man to follow him to another section of the Louvre where the pictures of Chardin are. There he would see the beauty in still life at home and in everyday activities like peeling turnips.

Gallery

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Jean Siméon Chardin at the Encyclopædia Britannica
  2. ^ The name "Baptiste" was erroneously added to his name through a notarial mistake. See the documentation in Rosenberg, Chardin, 1699–1779 (1979), 406.
  3. ^ "Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin". artchive.com.
  4. ^ a b c d "The Metropolitan Museum of Art – Special Exhibitions". Archived from the original on 12 March 2001.
  5. ^ a b Rosenberg p. 179.
  6. ^ Fournier, Edouard (1862). "Histoire du Pont-Neuf". google.com.
  7. ^ "Jean Siméon Chardin". National Gallery of Art. Retrieved 25 May 2020.
  8. ^ a b Rosenberg and Bruyant, p. 56.
  9. ^ Rosenberg and Bruyant, p. 20.
  10. ^ Rosenberg and Bruyant, p. 23.
  11. ^ Rosenberg and Bruyant, p. 32.
  12. ^ Rosenberg, p. 182.
  13. ^ a b Rosenberg, p. 183.
  14. ^ a b Rosenberg, p. 184.
  15. ^ "WebMuseum: Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon". ibiblio.org.
  16. ^ Morris, Roderick Conway (22 December 2010). "Chardin's Enchanting and Ageless Moments". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 1 January 2022. Retrieved 24 December 2010.
  17. ^ Rosenberg, p. 71.
  18. ^ Rosenberg and Bruyant, p. 190.
  19. ^ Chardin at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Archived 2007-09-27 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 15 July 2007.
  20. ^ Johnson, Paul. Art: A New History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003, p. 414.
  21. ^ "Search Results". collection.waddesdon.org.uk. Retrieved 12 April 2017.
  22. ^ Rosenberg and Bruyant, pp. 68–70.
  23. ^ Rosenberg and Bruyant, pp. 187 and 242.
  24. ^ "Without realizing he was doing it, he rejected his own time and opened the door to modernity". Rosenberg, cited by Wilkin, Karen, The Splendid Chardin, New Criterion. Requires subscription. Retrieved 15 October 2008.
  25. ^ a b Wilkin.
  26. ^ The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, the Early Years, 1869–1908, Hilary Spurling, p. 86
  27. ^ Smee, Sebastian, Lucian Freud 1996–2005, illustrated. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

References

External links

Media related to Jean Siméon Chardin at Wikimedia Commons

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