In the Same Series

CHARDIN

CONTENTS

[vii]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[9]

I

JEAN-BAPTISTE SIMÉON CHARDIN
occupies a curious position among the
artists of his time and country. His
art which, neglected and despised for many
decades after his death, is now admitted
by those best competent to judge to be
supreme as regards technical excellence,[10]
and, within the narrow limits of its subject
matter, to possess merits of far greater
significance than are to be found in the
work of any Frenchman, save Watteau,
from the founding of the school of Fontainebleau
to modern days, is apt to be
regarded as an isolated phenomenon, un-French,
out of touch, and out of sympathy
with the expression of the artistic genius of
eighteenth-century France. A grave misconception
of the true inwardness of things!
Rather should it be said that Chardin was
the one typically French painter among a
vast crowd of more or less close followers
of a tradition imported from Italy; the one
painter of the actual life of his people
among the artificial caterers for an artificial
and often depraved and lascivious taste;
a man of the people, of the vast multitude
formed by a homely, simple bourgeoisie;
painting for the people the subjects that
appealed to the people.

In order to understand the position of
Chardin in the art of his country it is[11]
necessary to bear in mind that the autochthonous
painting of France, the real expression
of French genius, was from its
early beginnings closely connected with the
art of the North, and not with that of Italy.
The style of the early French miniaturists
of the Burgundian School, of Fouquet and
of Clouet, is the style of the North; their
art is interwoven with the art of Flanders.
When in the time of François I. the School
of Fontainebleau, headed by Primaticcio
and Rosso, promulgated the gospel that
artistic salvation could only be found in the
emulation of Raphael and the masters of
the late Italian Renaissance, and of the
Bolognese eclectics; when finally degenerated
painters like Albani were held up as
example, official art became altogether
Italianised and stereotyped; and the climax
was reached with the foundation of the
School of Rome by Louis XIV. But, though
officially neglected and looked upon with
disfavour, the national element was not to
be altogether crushed by the foreign importation.[12]
Poussin remained French in spite
of Italian training, and held aloof from the
coterie of Court painters. Jacques Callot
carried on the national tradition, though as
a satirist and etcher of scenes from contemporary
life, rather than as a painter.
And the Netherlands continued directly or
indirectly to stir up the sluggish stream
of national French art—directly through
Watteau, who, born a Netherlander, became
the most typically French of all French
painters; indirectly, half a century earlier,
through the brothers Le Nain, who drew
their subjects and inspiration from the North
and their sombre colour from Spain; and
afterwards through Chardin, whose style
was so closely akin to that of the Flemings
that, when he first submitted some pieces
of still-life to the members of the Academy,
Largillière himself took them to be the
work of some excellent unknown Flemish
painter.

What are the qualities that raise Chardin’s
art so high above the showy productions[14]

of the French painters of his generation,
placing him on a pedestal by himself, and
gaining for him the respect, the admiration,
the love of all artists and discerning art
lovers? Why should this painter of still-life
and of small unpretentious domestic
genre pieces be extolled without reservation
and ranked among the world’s greatest
masters?

The question finds its simplest solution
in the fact that all great and lasting art
must be based on the study of Nature and
of contemporary life; that erudition and the
imitation of the virtues of painters that
belong to a dead period never result in
permanent appeal, especially if they find
expression in the repetition of mythological
and allegorical formulas which belong to
the past, and have long ceased to be a living
language. Chardin’s art is living and sincere,
with never a trace of affectation. In his
paintings the most unpromising material,
the most prosaic objects on a humble kitchen
table, the uneventful daily routine of lower[16]
middle-class life, are rendered interesting
by the warming flame of human sympathy
which moved the master to spend his supreme
skill upon them; by the human interest
with which he knew how to invest even
inanimate objects. No painter knew like
Chardin how to express in terms of paint
the substance and surface and texture of
the most varied objects; few have ever
equalled him in the faultless precision of his
colour values; fewer still have carried the
study of reflections to so fine a point, and
observed with such accuracy the most subtle
nuances of the changes wrought in the
colour appearance of one object by the
proximity of another—but these are qualities
that only an artist can fully appreciate, and
that can only be vaguely felt by the layman.
They belong to the sphere of technique.
The strong appeal of Chardin’s still-life is
due to the manner in which he invests inanimate
objects with living interest, with
a sense of intimacy that enlists our sympathy
for the humble folk with whose existence[17]
these objects are connected, and who, by
mere accident as it were, just happen to
be without the frame of the picture. Perhaps
they have just left the room, but the
atmosphere is still filled with their presence.

If ever there was a painter to whom
the old saying celare artem est summa
ars is applicable, surely it was Chardin!
A slow, meticulously careful worker, who
bestowed no end of time and trouble upon
every canvas, and whom nothing but perfection
would satisfy, he never attempted
to gain applause by a display of cleverness
or by technical fireworks. The perfection
of the result conceals the labour expended
upon it and the art by means of which it
is achieved. And so it is with the composition.
His still-life arrangements, where
everything is deliberate selection, have an
appearance of accidental grouping as though
the artist, fascinated by the colour of some
viands and utensils on a kitchen table, had
yielded to an irresistible impulse, and forthwith
painted the things just as they offered[18]
themselves to his delighted vision. How
different it all is to the conception of still-life
of his compatriots of the “grand century”
and even of his own time! It was a
sad misconception of the function and range
of art that made the seventeenth century
draw the distinction between “noble” and
“ignoble” subjects. When they “stooped”
to still-life it had to be ennobled—that is
to say, precious stuffs, elegant furniture,
bronzes and gold or silver goblets, choice
specimens of hot-house flowers, and such
like material were piled up in what was
considered picturesque abundance—and the
whole thing was as theatrical and tasteless
and sham-heroic as a portrait by Lebrun,
the Court favourite. Even the Dutch and
Flemish still-life painters of the period, who
had a far keener appreciation of Nature,
catered for the taste that preferred the display
of riches to simple truth. Their flowers
and fruit were carefully chosen faultless
specimens, accompanied generally by costly
objects and stuffs; and on the whole these[19]
large decorative pieces were painted with
wonderful accuracy in the rendering of
each individual blossom or other detail, but
with utter disregard of atmosphere. It has
been rightly said that these Netherlanders
gave the same kind of attention to every
object, whilst Chardin bestowed upon the
component parts of his still-life compositions
not the same kind, but the same
degree of attention. And above all, whilst
suggesting the texture and volume and
material of each individual object with
faultless accuracy, Chardin never lost sight
of the ensemble—that is to say, the opposition
of values, the interchange that takes
place between the colours of two different
objects placed in close proximity, the reflections
which appear not only where they
would naturally be expected, as on shiny
copper or other metals, but even those on
comparatively dull surfaces, which would
probably escape the attention of the untrained
eye. Chardin looked upon everything
with a true painter’s vision; and his[20]
brush expressed not his knowledge of the
form of things, but the visual impression
produced by their ensemble. He did not
think in outline, but in colour. If proof
were needed, it will be found in the extreme
scarcity of sketches and drawings
from his hand. Only very few sketches by
Chardin are known, and these few proclaim
the painter rather than the draughtsman.

Still, having pointed out the gulf that
divides our master from the still-life
painters of the grand siècle, it is only
right to add that he did not burst upon
the world as an isolated phenomenon, and
that painters like Desportes and Oudry
form the bridge from Monnoyer, the best
known of the French seventeenth-century
compilers of showy monumental still-life, to
Chardin. Monnoyer belongs to a time
that knew neither respect nor genuine love
for Nature and her laws. He simply
followed the rules of the grand style, and
had no eye for the play of reflections and
the other problems, which are the delight[21]
of the moderns—and Chardin is essentially
modern. Monnoyer’s son Baptiste, and his
son-in-law Belin de Fontenay did not
depart from his artificial manner. But
with Oudry, in spite of much that is still
traditional in his art, we arrive already at
a new conception of still-life painting. In
a paper read by this artist to the Academy
he relates how, in his student days, when
asked by Largillière to paint some flowers,
he placed a carefully chosen, gaily coloured
bouquet in a vase, when his master stopped
him and said: “I have set you this task
to train you for colour. Do you think the
choice you have made will do for the purpose?
Get a bunch of flowers all white.”
Oudry did as he was bid, and was then
told to observe that the flowers are brown
on the shadow side, that on a light ground
they appear in half tones, and that the
whitest of them are darker than absolute
white. Largillière then pointed out to him
the action of reflections, and made him
paint by the side of the flowers various[22]
white objects of different value for comparison.
Oudry was not a little surprised
at discovering that the flowers consisted of
an accumulation of broken tones, and were
given form and relief by the magic of
shadows. Both Oudry and Desportes did
not consider common objects unworthy of
their attention, and in this way led up to
the type of work in which Chardin afterwards
achieved his triumphs.

Chardin’s still-life pictures never appear
to be grouped to form balanced arrangements
of line and colour. The manner how
the objects are seen in the accidental
position in which they were left by the
hands that used them holds more than a
suggestion of genre painting. Indeed, it
may be said that all Chardin’s still-life
partakes of genre as much as his genre
partakes of still-life. A loaf of bread, a
knife, and a black bottle on a crumpled
piece of paper; a basket, a few eggs, and
a copper pot, and such like material, suffice
for him to create so vivid a picture of
[24]simple home life, that only the presence of
the housewife or serving-maid is needed
to raise the painting into the sphere of
domestic genre. Sometimes this scarcely
needed touch of actual life is given by the
introduction of some domestic animal; and
in these cases we already find a hint of
that unity of conception which in Chardin’s
genre pieces links the living creature to
the surrounding inanimate objects. Take
the famous “Skate” at the Louvre. On a
table you see an earthen pot, a saucepan,
a kettle, and a knife, grouped in accidental
disorder on a negligently spread white
napkin on the right; on the left are some
fish and oysters and leeks, and from the
wall behind is suspended a huge skate. A
cat is carefully feeling its way among the
oyster-shells, deeply interested in the various
victuals which it eyes with eager longing.
Even more pronounced is this attitude of
interest in Baron Henri de Rothschild’s
“Chat aux Aguets.” Here a crouching
cat, half puzzled, half excited, is seen in[26]
the extreme left corner, crouching in readiness
to spring at a dead hare that is lying
between a partridge and a magnificent
silver tureen, and is obviously the object of
the feline’s hesitating attention.

It is this complete absorption of the
protagonists of Chardin’s genre scenes in
their occupations or thoughts that fills his
work with such profound human interest.
Chardin is never anecdotal, never sentimental—in
this respect, as well as in the
solidity of his technique, and in his scientific
search for colour values and atmosphere, he
is vastly superior to Greuze, whose genre
scenes are never free from literary flavour
and from a certain kind of affectation. Nor
does Chardin ever fancy himself in the rôle
of the moralist like our own Hogarth, with
whom he has otherwise so much in common.
He looks upon his simple fellow-creatures
with a sympathetic eye, watching them in
the pursuit of their daily avocation, the
women conscientiously following the routine
of their housework or tenderly occupied[27]
with the education of their children, the
children themselves intent upon work or
play—never posing for artistic effect, but
wholly oblivious of the painter’s watching
eye. Chardin was by no means the first of
his country’s masters to devote himself to
contemporary life. Just as Oudry took the
first hesitating steps towards the Chardinesque
conception of still-life, so Jean Raoux
busied himself in the closing days of the
seventeenth century with creating records
of scenes taken from the daily life of the
people, but he never rid himself of the
sugary affected manner that was the taste
of his time. It was left to Chardin to
introduce into the art of genre painting
in France the sense of intimacy, the
homogeneous vision, the atmosphere of
reality which we find in such masterpieces
as the “Grace before Meat,” “The Reading
Lesson,” “The Governess,” “The Convalescent’s
Meal,” “The Card Castle,” the
“Récureuse,” the “Pourvoyeuse,” and the
famous “Child with the Top,” which, after[28]
having changed hands in 1845, at the time
when Chardin was held in slight esteem,
for less than £25, was recently bought for
the Louvre, together with the companion
portrait of Charles Godefroy, “The Young
Man with the Violin,” for the enormous
price of £14,000.

In the case of each of these pictures
the first thing that strikes your attention
is the complete absorption of the personages
in their occupation. In the picture
of the boy building the card castle you
can literally see him drawing in his breath
for fear of upsetting the fragile structure
which he is erecting. You imagine you
can hear the sigh of relief with which the
“Pourvoyeuse”—the woman returning from
market—deposits her heavy load of bread
on the dresser, whilst the sudden release of
the weight that had been supported by her
left arm seems to increase the strain on
her right. How admirable is the expression
of keen attention on the puckered brow of
the child who in “The Reading Lesson”[29]
tries to follow with plump finger the line
indicated by the school-mistress; or the
solicitude of the governess who, whilst
addressing some final words of advice
or admonition to the neatly dressed boy
about to depart for school, has just for the
moment ceased brushing his three-cornered
hat. There is no need to give further
instances. In all Chardin’s subject pictures
he opens a door upon the home life of the
simple bourgeoisie to which he himself belonged
by birth and character, and allows
you to watch from some safe hiding-place
the doings of these good folk who are
utterly unaware of your presence.

Having devoted his early years to still-life,
and his prime to domestic genre,
Chardin lived long enough to weary his
public and critics, and to find himself in the
position of a fallen favourite. But though
his eyesight had become affected, and his
hands had lost the sureness of their touch,
so that he had practically to give up oil-painting,
he entered in his last years upon[30]
a short career of glorious achievement in an
entirely new sphere—he devoted himself to
portraiture in pastel, and gained once more
the enthusiastic applause of the people, even
though the critics continued to exercise
their severe and prejudiced judgment, and
to blame him for that very verve and violence
of technique which later received the
Goncourt brothers’ unstinted praise. “What
surprising images. What violent and inspired
work; what scrumbling and modelling;
what rapid strokes and scratches!” His
pastel portraits of himself and of his second
wife, and his magnificent head of a jockey
have the richness and plastic life of oil-paintings,
and have indeed more boldness
and virility than the work even of the most
renowned of all French pastellists, La Tour.
In view of their freshness and vigour, it is
difficult to realise that they are the work
of a suffering septuagenarian.

The mention of the hostility shown by
Chardin’s contemporary critics towards the
system of juxtaposing touches of different[31]
colour in his pastels, opens up a very
interesting question with regard to the
master’s technique of oil-painting and of the
eighteenth-century critics’ attitude towards
it. There is no need to dwell upon the
comment of a man like Mariette, who discovers
in Chardin’s paintings the signs of
too much labour, and deplores the “heavy
monotonous touch, the lack of ease in the
brushwork, and the coldness of his work”—the
“coldness” of the master who, alone
among all the painters of his time and
country, knew how to fill his canvases with
a luscious warm atmosphere, and to blend
his tones in the mellowest of harmonies!
“His colour is not true enough,” runs another
of Mariette’s comments.

Let us now listen to Diderot, though in
fairness it should be stated that the remarks
which follow refer to Chardin’s later work
between 1761 and 1767. First of all he is
set down as “ever a faithful imitator of
Nature in his own manner, which is rude
and abrupt—a nature low, common, and[32]
domestic.” A strange pronouncement on the
part of the same ill-balanced critic who, four
years later, condemned Boucher because
“in all this numberless family you will not
find one employed in a real act of life,
studying his lesson, reading, writing, stripping
hemp.” Thus Chardin’s vice is turned
into virtue when it is a question of abusing
a master who avoided the “low, common,
and domestic.” In his topical criticism on
the Salon of 1761 Diderot tells us of
Chardin, that it is long since he has
“finished” anything; that he shirks trouble,
and works like a man of the world who is
endowed with talent and skill. In 1765
Diderot utters the following curious statement:
“Chardin’s technique is strange.
When you are near you cannot distinguish
anything; but as you step back the objects
take form and begin to be real nature.”
On a later occasion he describes Chardin’s
style as “a harsh method of painting with
the thumb as much as with the brush; a
juxtaposition of touches, a confused and
[34]sparkling accumulation of pasty and rich
colours.” Diderot is borne out by Bachaumont
who at the same period writes: “His
method is irregular. He places his colours
one after the other, almost without mixing, so
that his work bears a certain resemblance
to mosaic, or point carré needlework.”
This description, given by two independent
contemporaries, almost suggests the
technique of the modern impressionists and
pointillists; and if the present appearance
of Chardin’s paintings scarcely tallies with
Diderot’s and Bachaumont’s explanation, it
should not be forgotten that a century and a
half have passed over these erstwhile “rude
and violent” mosaics of colour touches, and
that this stretch of time is quite sufficient
to allow the colours to re-act upon each
other—in a chemical sense, to permeate
each other, to fuse and blend, and to form
a mellow, warm, harmonious surface that
shows no trace of harsh and abrupt touches.
Thus it would appear that Chardin discounted
the effects of time and worked for[36]
posterity. In one of his rare happy moments
Diderot realised this fact, and took up the
cudgels for our master. In his critique of
the 1767 Salon he explains that “Chardin
sees his works twelve years hence; and
those who condemn him are as wrong as
those young artists who copy servilely at
Rome the pictures painted 150 years ago.”

II

Chardin’s physical appearance, such as
we find it in authentic portraits, his character,
as it is revealed to us by his words and
his actions, and the whole quiet and comparatively
uneventful course of his life, are
in most absolute harmony with his art. Indeed,
Chardin’s personality might, with a
little imagination, be reconstructed from his
pictures. He was a bourgeois to the
finger-tips—a righteous, kind-hearted, hard-working
man who never knew the consuming
fire of a great passion, and who was[37]
apparently free from the vagaries, inconsistencies,
and irregularities usually associated
with the artistic temperament. Though
never overburdened with the weight of
worldly possessions, he was never in real
poverty, never felt the pangs of hunger.
He had as good an education as his
father’s humble condition would permit,
and his choice of a career not only met
with no opposition, but was warmly encouraged.
In his profession he rose slowly
and gradually to high honour, and never
experienced serious rebuffs or checks. His
disposition was not of the kind to kindle
enmity or even jealousy. His early affection
for the girl who was to become his
first wife was faithful, but not of the kind
to prompt him to hasty action—he waited
until his financial position enabled him to keep
a modest home, and then he married. He
married a second time, nine years after his
first wife’s death, and this time his choice
fell upon a widow with a small fortune, a
practical shrewd woman, who was of no[38]
little help to him in the management of his
affairs. It was not exactly a love match,
but the two simple people suited each
other, were of the same social position, and
in similar comfortable circumstances, and
managed to live peacefully and contentedly
in modest bourgeois fashion.

How dull, how bald, how negative the
smooth course of this life of virtue and
honest labour seems, contrasted with the
eventful, stormy, passionate life of a Boucher
or a Fragonard who were in the stream of
fashion, and adopted the manner and licentiousness
and vices of their courtly patrons.
There is never an immodest thought,
never a piquant suggestion in Chardin’s
paintings. They reflect his own life;
perhaps they represent the very surroundings
in which he spent his busy days, for
we find in their sequence the clear indication
of growing prosperity from a condition
which verges on poverty—respectable, not
sordid, poverty—to comparative luxury;
from drudgery in kitchen and courtyard to
[40]tea in the cosy parlour. There can be but
little doubt that many a time the master’s
brush was devoted to the recording of his
own home, his own family, the even tenor
of his life.

The man’s character—and more than
that, his milieu—are expressed in no uncertain
fashion in his three auto-portraits,
two of which are at the Louvre, and one
in the Collection of M. Léon Michel-Lévy.
A good, kind-hearted, simple-minded man
he appears in these pastel portraits, which
all date from the last years of his life, a
man incapable of wickedness or meanness,
and endowed with a keen sense of humour
that lingers about the corners of his mouth.
It is a face that immediately enlists sympathy
by its obvious readiness for sympathy
with others. And so convincing are
these portraits in their straightforward bold
statement, that they may be accepted as
documentary testimony to the man’s character,
even if we had not the evidence of
Fragonard’s much earlier portrait of Chardin,[42]
which was until recently in the Rodolphe
Kann Collection, and is at present in the
possession of Messrs. Duveen Bros. With
the exception of such differences as may be
accounted for by the differences of age, all
these portraits tally to a remarkable degree.
The features are the same, and the
expression is identical—the same keen,
penetrating eyes, which even in his declining
years have lost none of their searching
intelligence, even though they have to
be aided by round horn-rimmed spectacles;
the same revelation of a lovable nature,
even though in M. Michel-Lévy’s version
worry and suffering have left their traces
on the features. He is the embodiment of
decent middle-class respectability. Decency
and a high sense of honour marked every
act of his life, and decency had to be
kept up in external appearances. On his
very deathbed, when he was tortured by
the pangs of one of the most terrible of
diseases, dropsy having set in upon stone,
he still insisted upon his daily shave!

[43]
Yet Chardin, the bourgeois incarnate,
was anything but a Philistine. From this
he was saved by his life-long devotion to,
and his ardent enthusiasm for, his art. He
was not given to bursts of the theatrical
eloquence that is so dear to the men of his
race; but the scanty records we have of
his sayings testify to the humble, profound
respect in which he held the art of painting.
“Art is an island of which I have only
skirted the coast-line,” runs the often quoted
phrase to which he gave utterance at a
time when he had attained to his highest
achievement. To an artist who talked
to him about his method of improving
the colours, he replied in characteristic
fashion: “And who has told you, sir, that one
paints with colours?” “With what then?”
questioned his perplexed interviewer. “One
uses colours, but one paints with feeling.”

Brilliant technician as he was, and
admirable critic of his own and other artists’
work, Chardin lacked the gift to communicate
his knowledge to others. He was[44]
a bad teacher—he was a wretched teacher.
Even such pliable material as Fragonard’s
genius yielded no results to his honest
efforts. It was Boucher who, at the height
of his vogue and overburdened with commissions
that did not allow him the time to
devote himself to the nursing of a raw
talent, recommended Fragonard to work in
Chardin’s studio; but six months’ teaching
by the master failed to bring out the pupil’s
brilliant gifts. Chardin knew not how to
impart his marvellous technique to young
Fragonard, and Fragonard returned to
Boucher without having appreciably benefited
by Chardin’s instruction. The master had
no better luck with his own son, though in
this case the failure was due rather to lack
of talent than to bad teaching, for Van Loo
and Natoire were equally unsuccessful in
their efforts to develop the unfortunate
young man’s feeble gifts. There is a touch
of deepest pathos in the reference made by
Chardin to his son at the close of an
address to his Academic colleagues in 1765:[45]
“Gentlemen, gentlemen, be indulgent! He
who has not felt the difficulty of art does
nothing that counts; he who, like my son,
has felt it too much, does nothing at all.
Farewell, gentlemen, and be indulgent, be
indulgent!”

Chardin had no artistic progeny to carry
on his tradition, partly, perhaps, because he
failed as a teacher, more probably because
the Revolution and the Empire were close
at hand when he died, and because the
social upheavals led to new ideals and to
an art that was based on an altogether
different æsthetic code. The star of David
rose when Chardin’s gave its last flickers;
and Chardin himself was among the commissioners
who signed on the 10th of
January 1778 the highly laudatory report on
David’s large battle sketch sent to Paris by
the Director of the School of Rome. Yet
who would venture to-day to mention the two
in the same breath. David has fallen into
well-deserved oblivion, and the example of
Chardin’s glorious paintings has done what[46]
was beyond the master’s own power—it has
created a School that is daily enlisting an
increasing number of highly gifted followers.
Chardin’s name is honoured and revered in
every modern painter’s studio.

III

Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin was born
in Paris on November 2, 1699, the second
son of Jean Chardin, cabinetmaker, or to
be more strict, billiard-table maker, a hard-working
man who rose to be syndic of
his corporation, but who, the father of a
family of five, was fortunately not sufficiently
prosperous to give his son a literary education.
I say fortunately, because it was
probably his ignorance of mythology and
classic lore that made Chardin, who often
bitterly regretted his educational deficiencies,
turn his attention to those subjects which
required a keenly observing eye and a sure
hand, and not a fertile imagination stimulated[47]
by book-knowledge. His lack of education
saved Chardin from allegorical and mythological
clap-trap, and made him the great
painter of the visible world of his time.
Though Jean Chardin wanted his son to
take up his own profession, he was quick
in recognising and encouraging the boy’s
early talent, and finally made him enter the
Atelier of Pierre Jacques Cazes where
Siméon received his first systematic training.
Cazes was a capable enough painter in the
traditional grand manner of Le Brun, which
had been taught to him by Bon Boullogne.
He had taken the Prix de Rome, and issued
victorious from several other competitions,
but, like Rigaud and Largillière and several
other distinguished painters of the period,
never availed himself of the privilege entailed
by the award of the Prix de Rome. Indeed,
he was not a little proud of this fact, as
he showed by his reply to Crozat who commiserated
with him for having never seen
the Italian masterpieces—”I have proved
that one can do without them.” Yet whatever[48]
merit there may have been in Cazes’
work, and whatever may have been his
own opinion on this subject, prosperity came
not his way; and although he was appointed
Professor at the Academy, and rose to great
popularity as a teacher, he remained so
poor that he could not afford to provide
his pupils with living models. They had
to learn what they could from copying their
master’s compositions and studies.

The copying of designs, based on literary
conceptions and knowledge of the
classics, could not possibly be either beneficial
or attractive for a youth who lacked
the education needed for understanding
these subjects, and who was, moreover,
deeply interested in the life that came
under his personal observation. The tasks
set to him by Cazes must have appeared
to Chardin like the drudgery of acquiring
proficiency in a hieroglyphic language that
conveyed no definite meaning to him. Still,
Chardin made such progress under his first
master that Noël Nicolas Coypel engaged
[50]him as assistant to paint the details in
some decorative over-door panels representing
the Seasons and the Pleasures of the
Chase.

In Coypel Chardin found a master of
very different calibre—a teacher after his
own heart. The systematised knowledge
of the principles adopted by the late Bolognese
masters, rules of composition and of
the distribution of light and shade, were
certainly of little use to him when, on beginning
his work in Coypel’s studio, he
was set the task of painting a gun in the
hand of a sportsman. Chardin was amazed
at the trouble taken by his employer, and
at the amount of thought expended by him
upon the placing and lighting of the object.
The painting of this gun was Chardin’s first
valuable lesson. He was made to realise
the importance of a comparatively insignificant
accessory. He was shown how its
position would affect the rhythm of the design.
He was taught to paint with minute
accuracy whatever his eye beheld. He was[52]
told, perhaps for the first time, that it was
not enough to paint a hieroglyphic that
will be recognised to represent a gun, but
that the paint should express the true appearance
of the object, its plastic form, its
surface, the texture of the material, the
play of light and shade and reflections.
The lesson of this gun gave the death
blow to traditional recipes, and laid the
foundation of Chardin’s art.

Chardin did well under the new tuition,
so well that Jean-Baptiste Van Loo engaged
him to help in the restoration of some
paintings in the gallery of Fontainebleau.
It must have been a formidable task, since
not only Chardin, but J. B. Van Loo’s
younger brother Charles and some Academy
students were made to join the master’s
staff. Five francs a day and an excellent
dinner on the completion of the work were
the wages for the job which in some way
was a memorable event in our master’s life.
With the exception of a visit to Rouen in
his old age, the trip to Fontainebleau[53]
afforded Chardin the only glimpse he ever
had of the world beyond Paris and the surrounding
district.

The first record we have of Chardin’s
independent activity has reference to an
astonishing piece of work which has disappeared
long since, but is known to us
from an etching by J. de Goncourt. The
work in question was a large signboard, 14
feet 3 inches long by 2 feet 3 inches wide,
commissioned from him by a surgeon who
was on terms of friendship with Chardin’s
father. Perhaps the young artist had seen
Watteau’s famous signboard for Gersaint,
now in the German Emperor’s Collection.
However this may be, like Watteau he
departed from the customary practice of
filling the board with a design made up of
the implements of the patron’s craft,1 and
painted an animated street scene, representing
the sequel to a duel. The scene is
[54]outside the house of a surgeon who is attending
to the wound of the defeated combatant,
whilst a group of idle folk of all
conditions, attracted by curiosity, have assembled
in the street, and are watching
the proceedings, and excitedly discussing
the occurrence. Although Goncourt’s etching
naturally gives no indication of the
colour and technique of this remarkable
and unconventional painting, it enables us
to see the very natural and skilful grouping
and the excellent management of light
and shade which Chardin had mastered
even at that early period.

The sign was put up on a Sunday, and
attracted a vast crowd whose exclamations
induced the surgeon to step outside his
house and ascertain the cause of the stir.
Being a man of little taste, his anger was
aroused by Chardin’s bold departure from
convention, but the general approval with
which the quartier greeted Chardin’s original
conception soon soothed his ruffled spirit, and
the incident led to no further unpleasantness.

[55]
Save for the story of the surgeon’s sign,
nothing is known of Chardin’s doings from
his days of apprenticeship to his first appearance,
in 1728, at the Exposition de la
Jeunesse, a kind of open-air Salon without
jury, held annually in the Place Dauphine
on Corpus Christi day, between 6 A.M. and
midday, “weather permitting.” With the
exception of the annual Salon at the
Louvre, which was only open to the works
of the members of the Academy, this
Exposition de la Jeunesse was the only
opportunity given to artists for submitting
their works to the public. At the time
when Chardin made his début at this
picture fair, the annual Academy Salon
instituted by Louis XIV. had been abandoned
for some years, so that even the
members of the Academy were driven to
the Place Dauphine in order to keep in
touch with the public. In the contemporary
criticisms of the Mercure the names of all
the greatest French masters of the first
half of the eighteenth century are to be[56]
found among the exhibitors of the Jeunesse—the
shining lights of the profession, Coypel,
Rigaud, De Troy, among the crowd of
youngsters eager to make their reputation.
Lancret, Oudry, Boucher, Nattier, Lemoine—none
of them disdained to show their
works under conditions which had much
more in common with those that obtain at
an annual fair, than with those we are
accustomed to associate with a picture
exhibition. The spectacle of dignified Academicians
thus seeking public suffrage in the
street finally induced Louis de Boullogne,
Director of the Academy, to seek for an
amelioration of the prevailing conditions,
and thanks to the intervention of the
Comptroller-general of the King’s Buildings
the Salon of the Louvre was re-opened
in 1725 for a term of four days—”outsiders”
being excluded as of yore.

On Corpus Christi day, 1728, Chardin,
then in his twenty-ninth year, availed himself
for the first time of the opportunity given to
rising talent, and made his appearance at[57]
the Place Dauphine with a dozen still-life
paintings, including “The Skate” and “The
Buffet”—the two masterpieces which are
counted to-day among the treasured possessions
of the Louvre. This sudden revelation
of so personal and fully developed a talent
caused no little stir. Chardin was hailed
as a master worthy to be placed beside the
great Netherlandish still-life painters, and
was urged by his friends to “present himself”
forthwith at the Academy. Chardin
reluctantly followed the advice, and, having
arranged his pictures ready for inspection
in the first room of the Academy at the
Louvre, retired to an adjoining apartment,
where he awaited, not without serious misgivings,
the result of his bold venture.

His fears proved to be unfounded. A
contemporary of Chardin’s has left an
amusing account of what befell our timid
artist. M. de Largillière entered the first
room and carefully examined the pictures
placed there by Chardin. Then he passed
into the next room to speak to the candidate.[58]
“You have here some very fine
pictures which are surely the work of some
good Flemish painter—an excellent school
for colour, this Flemish school. Now let
us see your works.” “Sir, you have just
seen them.” “What! these were your
pictures?” “Yes, sir.” “Then,” said Largillière,
“present yourself, my friend, present
yourself.” Cazes, Chardin’s old master, likewise
fell into the innocent trap, and was
equally complimentary, without suspecting
the authorship of the exposed pictures.
In fact, he undertook to stand as his
pupil’s sponsor. When Louis de Boullogne,
Director of the Academy and painter to
the king, arrived, Chardin informed him
that the exhibited pictures were painted by
him, and that the Academy might dispose
of those which were approved of. “He is
not yet ‘confirmed’ (agréé) and he talks
already of being ‘received’ (reçu)!2 However,”
he added, “you have done well to
[60]mention it.” He reported the proposal,
which was immediately accepted. The
ballot resulted in Chardin being at the
same time, “confirmed” and “received.”
On Sept. 25, 1728, he was sworn in, and
became a full member of the Academy. In
recognition of his rare genius, and in consideration
of his impecunious condition, his
entrance fee was reduced to 100 livres.
“The Buffet” and a “Kitchen” piece were
accepted as “diploma pictures.”

In spite of this sudden success, Chardin
was by no means on the road to fortune.
His pictures sold slowly and at very low
prices. He always had a very modest opinion
of the financial value of his works, and was
ever ready to part with them at ridiculously
low prices, or to offer them as presents to
his friends. The story goes that on one
occasion, when his friend Le Bas wished
to buy a picture which Chardin was just
finishing, he offered to exchange it for a
pretty waistcoat. When the king’s sister
admired one of his pastel portraits and[62]
asked the price, he immediately begged
her to accept it “as a token of gratitude for
her interest in his work.” Admirably tactful
is the form in which Chardin gives practical
expression to his gratitude for M. de Vandières’
successful efforts at procuring him
a pension from the king. Through Lépicié,
the secretary of the Academy, he begs
Vandières to accept the dedication of an engraving
after his “Lady with a Bird-organ”;
and asks permission to state on the margin
that the original painting is in the Collection
of M. de Vandières. The request
was granted.

Small wonder, then, if in spite of the
modesty of his personal requirements Chardin,
even after his election to the Academy,
had to wait over two years before he was
in a position to marry Marguerite Sainctar,
whom he had met at a dance some years
before, and who during the period of waiting
had lost her health, her parents, and her
modest fortune, and had to go to live with
her guardian. Chardin’s father, who had[63]
warmly approved of his son’s engagement,
now objected to the marriage, but nothing
could deter Siméon from his honourable
purpose, and the marriage took place at
St. Sulpice on February 1, 1731. He took
his wife to his parents’ house at the corner
of the Rue Princesse, where he had been
living before his marriage, and before the
end of the year he was presented with a
son, who was given the name Pierre Jean-Baptiste.
Two years later a daughter was
born—Marguerite Agnes; but Chardin’s
domestic happiness was not destined to
last long, for on April 14, 1735, he lost both
wife and daughter.

His son was, however, his greatest source
of grief. Remembering the imaginary disadvantages
he had suffered from his lack
of humanistic education, he determined that
his boy should be better equipped for the
artistic profession, and had him thoroughly
well instructed in the classics. He then
had him prepared at one of the Academy
ateliers for competing for the Prix de Rome.[64]
No doubt owing to his father’s then rather
powerful influence, Pierre Chardin gained
the coveted prize in 1754, and after having
passed his three years’ probation at the
recently established École des élèves protégés,
which he had entered with the second
batch of pupils by whom the first successful
“Romans” were replaced, he set out for
Rome in October 1757. But Pierre, discouraged
perhaps from his earliest attempts
by the perfection of his father’s art which
he could never hope to attain, indolent
moreover and intractable, made little progress
under Natoire, who was then Director of
the School of Rome. Pierre worked little,
quarrelled with his colleagues, and never
produced either a copy or an original work
that was considered good enough to be
sent to Paris. “He does not know how to
handle the brush, and what he does looks
like a tired and not very pleasing attempt,”
runs Natoire’s report to Marigny in 1761.
He returned to Paris in 1762, but his whole
life was a failure. He fully realised his[65]
inability ever to arrive at artistic achievement.
In 1767 he went to Venice with
the French ambassador, the Marquis de
Paulmy, and was never heard of since. It
was said that he had found his death in
the waters of a Venetian Canal.

But to return to Siméon Chardin—we
find him again among the exhibitors of
the Place Dauphine in 1732, with some
pieces of still-life, two large decorative
panels of musical trophies, and a wonderfully
realistic painting in imitation of a bronze
bas-relief after a terra-cotta of Duquesnoy.
These imitation reliefs were then much in
vogue for over-doors and wall decorations
in the houses of the great, as, for instance,
in the Palace of Compiègne. Two authentic
pieces of the kind, executed in grisaille,
are in the Collection of Dr. Tuffier. The
one of the 1732 exhibition was bought
by Van Loo for 200 livres, and is now
in the Marcille Collection. According to
contemporary criticism the bronze-tone of
the relief was so perfectly rendered that it[66]
produced an illusion “which touch alone can
destroy.”

About this time Chardin’s still-life period
comes to a close, and we find him henceforth
devoting the best of his power to the
domestic genre “à la Teniers” (as it was
dubbed by his own patrons and contemporaries),
though even in later years
still-life pieces continue to figure now and
then among his Salon exhibits. His first
triumphs in the new field of action were scored
in 1734, when his sixteen contributions to the
Jeunesse exhibition included the “Washerwoman”
(now in the Hermitage Collection),
the “Woman drawing Water” (painted in
several versions or replicas, of which the best
known are at the Stockholm Museum, and
in the Collections of Sir Frederick Cook at
Richmond and of M. Eudoxe Marcille in
Paris); the “Card Castle” (now in the Collection
of Baron Henri de Rothschild); and
the “Lady sealing a Letter” (in the German
Emperor’s Collection). It is interesting to
note that this last named picture is the[67]
only genre piece by Chardin with life size
figures.

Chardin’s new departure immediately
found favour, and although he continued
to charge ludicrously inadequate prices for
his work, which, with the deliberate slowness
of his method, prevented him from rising
to well deserved prosperity, he not only
experienced no difficulty in disposing of his
pictures, but had to duplicate and reduplicate
them to meet the demand of his
patrons, foremost among whom were the
Swedish Count Tessin and the Austrian
Prince Liechtenstein. In view of the many
versions that exist of most of the master’s
genre pieces it is often difficult or impossible
to decide which is the original, and
which a replica. The artist’s modesty with
regard to his charges may be gathered from
the fact that, at the time of his highest
vogue, he only asked twenty-five louis-d’or
a piece for two pictures commissioned by
Count Tessin, whilst the painter Wille was
able to secure a pair for thirty-six livres.

[68]
Three of the genre pictures of the 1734
exhibition were sent by Chardin in the
following year to a competitive show held
by the Academicians to fill the vacancies of
professor, adjuncts, and councillors of the
Academy; but Chardin was among the unsuccessful
candidates, the votes declaring in
favour of Michel and Carle Van Loo, Boucher,
Natoire, Lancret, and Parrocel.

The regular course of the Academy
Salons, which had been interrupted since
1704, save for the tentative four days’ exhibition
at the Louvre in 1725, was resumed
in 1737, first in alternate years, and then
annually without break until the present
day. At the inaugural exhibition Chardin
exhibited again the three pieces of the
1732 and 1735 shows, together with Van Loo’s
bronze relief, the portrait of his friend
Aved (known as “Le Souffleur,” or “The
Chemist”), and several pictures of children
playing, a class of subject in which the
master stands unrivalled among the
Frenchmen of his time. Fragonard, of
[70]course, achieved greatness as a painter of
children, but to him the child was an
object for portraiture, whilst Chardin, the
student of life, painted the life, the work
and pleasures, of the child, at the same
time never losing sight of portraiture.

His success was decisive. His reputation
was now firmly established, and still
further increased by his next year’s exhibit
of eight pictures—among them the “Boy
with the Top,” and also the “Lady sealing
a Letter,” which he had already shown at
the Jeunesse exhibition in 1734. Six pictures
followed in the next year, including the
“Governess,” the “Pourvoyeuse” (now in
the Louvre), and the “Cup of Tea”; and
in 1740 his popularity reached its zenith
with the exhibition of his masterpiece “Grace
before Meat” (le Bénédicité), in addition
to which he showed the two singeries—”The
Monkey Painter” and “The Monkey
Antiquary” (now in the Louvre)—even
Chardin could not hold out against the
bad taste which applauded this stupid invention[72]
of the Netherlanders—and several
other domestic genre pieces. A replica of
the Bénédicité was commissioned by Count
Tessin for the King of Sweden, and is now
at the Stockholm Museum.

The bad state of his health seriously
interfered with his work during the next
few years, and his contributions to the
Salon of 1741 were restricted to “The Morning
Toilet” and “M. Lenoir’s Son building
a Card Castle,” whilst he was an absentee
from the following year’s exhibition.

In 1743 Chardin lost his mother, with
whom he had been living since his wife’s
death, and who had been looking after his
boy’s early education. Chardin, slow worker
as he always was, and overwhelmed with
commissions for new pictures and replicas,
which he continued to paint at starvation
rates, had no time to devote to the bringing
up of his son, which was perhaps one of
the reasons which induced him to marry,
in the year following his mother’s death,
a musketeer’s widow, of thirty-seven, Fran[73]çoise
Marguerite Pouget, a worthy woman
of no particular personal charm, to judge
from the portrait left by the master’s chalks,
but an excellent housekeeper who managed
to bring a certain degree of order into her
husband’s affairs, and proved to be of no
little assistance to him in his business
dealings. It was not exactly a love match,
but there is no reason for doubting that
the two worthy people lived in complete
harmony and enjoyed a fair amount of
comfort. The repeated references to his
“financial troubles” need not be taken in
too literal a sense, since from 1744, the
year of his marriage, when he transferred
his quarters to his wife’s house in the Rue
Princesse, until 1774, when his affairs really
took a turn for the bad, he enjoyed the
ownership of a house which he was then
able to sell for 18,000 livres, a by no means
paltry amount for these days. Moreover, in
1752, Lépicié’s endeavours resulted in the
grant of a pension of 500 livres by the king,
which, according to the petitioner’s own[74]
words, was sufficient to secure Chardin’s
comfort. True enough, when the artist
died in 1779, his widow applied for relief
on the pretext of being practically left
without means of subsistence. But an investigation
of the case led to the discovery
that she was in enjoyment of an annual income
of from 6000 to 8000 livres! A daughter,
who was born to the master by his second
wife, died soon after having seen the light
of the world.

The year 1746 was apparently more productive
than the five preceding years; but
henceforth the number of his subject pictures
became more and more restricted,
and Chardin, perhaps discouraged by the
public grumbling at his lack of original invention,
returned to the sphere of his early
successes—to still-life. Meanwhile his probity
and uprightness had gained him the
highest esteem of his Academic colleagues
and brought him new honours in his official
position. He was appointed Treasurer of
the Academy in 1755, and soon afterwards[75]
succeeded J. A. Portail as “hanger” of the
Salon exhibition, a difficult office which
needed a man of Chardin’s tact, fairness,
and honesty.

When Chardin took up his duties as
Treasurer he found the finances of the
Academy in a deplorable condition. His
predecessor J. B. Reydellet, who had acted
as “huissier and concierge,” had neither
been able to exercise a restraining influence
upon the rowdy tendencies of the students,
nor to keep even a semblance of order in
the accounts. On his death his legacy to
the Academy was a deficit of close on
10,000 livres. Chardin, assisted by his business-like
wife, did his best to wipe off the
effects of his predecessor’s negligence or
incompetence, but the task added very
considerably to his worries, especially as,
owing to financial stress, the Academicians’
pensions were frequently kept in arrear,
and for years Royal support was withheld.
Matters reached a climax in 1772, when
the Academy found itself in such straits,[76]
that the question of dissolving the institution
had to be seriously considered.
Chardin’s appeal to Marigny, and through
him to the Abbé Terray, Comptroller-General
of Finances, however, led to the
desired result, and the much needed support
was granted.

The quarters at the Louvre, vacated by
the death of the king’s engraver and goldsmith
Marteau in March 1757, were given
to Chardin, who let his house in the Rue
Princesse to Joseph Vernet—another change
which must have contributed considerably
to the ageing master’s peace of mind. In
his wonted slow manner he continued to
paint still-life, and received several important
commissions for the decoration of
Royal and other residences. Thus, in
1764, his friend Cochin procured for him,
through Marigny, a commission for some
over-doors for the Château of Choisy. They
depicted the attributes of Science, Art, and
Music, and were exhibited in the Salon of
1765. A similar order for two over-doors[77]
in the music-room of the Château of
Bellevue—the instruments of civil and of
military music—followed in the next year.
The payment for the five, which was delayed
until 1771, amounted to 5000 livres.

Chardin’s last years were saddened by
the tragic end of his son and by a terribly
painful illness. His duties as Treasurer
became too much for him, and he resigned
this office to the sculptor Coustou in 1774.
There was a small deficit which he volunteered
to make good, but this offer was
declined, and a banquet was given to him
by his colleagues as an expression of their
appreciation of his services. The acute
suffering caused by his illness did not prevent
him from continuing his artistic work,
and we find him at the very end of his
career branching out in an entirely new
direction. The pastel portraits of his closing
years betray no decline in keenness of
vision and in power of expression. Indeed,
they must be counted among his finest
achievements. He worked to the very last,[78]
and sent some pastel heads to the Salon
of 1779. On the 6th of December of the
same year he breathed his last. His remains
were buried at St. Germain-l’Auxerrois,
in the parish of the Louvre. With
him died the art of the French eighteenth
century. A kind fate had saved him from
the misfortune that fell to the share of his
contemporaries Fragonard and Greuze, who
outlived him by many years, but who also
outlived the ancien régime and died in
poverty and neglect and misery.

The plates are printed by Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., London and Derby
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh