Saying Grace (Chardin)

Saying Grace or The Prayer Before a Meal (

Chardin is well known for his depictions of humble, everyday life.[6] Le Bénédicité shows a modest, middle-class interior scene, where a mother is laying the table for a meal. She instructs her children to say their grace before eating. The younger of the children can easily appear a girl to the modern eye, if the drum hanging on the child-sized ladderback chair is overlooked,^[7] and is indeed identified as such in Gardner.^[8] Rand and Bianco, however, quote the inscription on a contemporary engraving, describing the child as a boy,^[9] who has not yet been breeched. The quiet, peaceful atmosphere is reinforced by the subdued colour scheme, and the muted lighting.^[10] Chardin put much work into the arrangement of the various elements of his paintings. The composition here is meticulous, and the stability created by the triangular structure of the three figures also adds to the tranquillity of the scene.^[2]

Variants

The

In 2014, a version of the painting in the collection of Lady Wemyss was attributed to the school of Chardin and sold for £1.15M. A subsequent examination revealed Chardin's signature, leading to its reattribution to Chardin. It was resold for $10.5m (£8.5m) in January 2015.^[13]

Reception

Chardin is often contrasted to Watteau, whose paintings of aristocratic life differ greatly from those of Chardin's common people.^[10] It is not known for certain whether Le Bénédicité was painted with Louis XV in mind, or if it was the king who personally picked the painting out from the 1740 exhibition.^[2] In either case, the purchase shows the appeal the painting had to its contemporaries. When it was rediscovered in 1845 – on the eve of the revolutions of 1848 – it had taken on a whole new meaning. To the bourgeois establishment, the works of Chardin now represented a salutary contrast to the 'decadent aristocratic flimsy' of Watteau.^[4] In 1848, an anonymous reviewer in the journal Magasin Pittoresque wrote:

Watteau did lunches on the grass, walks in the moonlight, the capricious beauty of the day with her elegant lover of choice, dances under the trees with titled shepherds and shepherdesses; but Chardin did the honest and peaceful interior, the mother who clothes her son before sending him to school, the mother teaching her offspring to stutter the name of God...It would seem that one century could not contain two stories so different, yet they coincided.

— vol. XVI, 1848^[4]

References