CHARDIN

Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin--a man of the _bourgeoisie_, as original

as Hogarth--was born on the 2nd November 1699. It was in Paris, in the

quarter of St. Sulpice, in the trading quarter where shopkeepers and

skilled artisans wait on the wants of the neighbouring Faubourg St.

Germain. He was of humble, decent parentage, as befitted the place;

and he had for godmother, when he was christened, one Anne Bourgine,

wife of Jacques Riche, who declared herself unable to sign her name

in attestation of the event. Chardin’s father was a cabinet-maker; a

dexterous craftsman, with a speciality which, along with such honour

as it afforded, he passed on to one of his sons. He made, as Chardin’s

best biographer has told us, ‘ces billards monumentaux dont une planche

de Bonnart nous a gardé le dessin,’ and he made them for the King. But

though he worked successfully and well, the burden of a family weighed

on his fortunes, and his thought about his children was chiefly that

they might find means of support. Chardin was given little education,

and he was to have followed his father’s trade, but he showed, in his

quite early youth, enough of promise as a painter for it to be held

reasonable that he should enter M. Cazes’ painting-room. Cazes was not

at this time an unknown artist, but Chardin learned almost nothing

from him. The inventor of a _genre_, Chardin must needs be his own

best teacher. Time and his own individuality alone could allow him his

sturdy facility of touch. Only in working for himself could he acquire

the schemes of colour, the tones, the delicate justice of expression,

for which we admire him to-day. And if he was already independent of

a master in the selection of his method, still more his own was his

choice of the world which he observed to record.

That world, of which Chardin has given us so veracious yet so poetic a

chronicle, was indeed the world of his daily life. His art concerned

itself with the familiar pursuits of the lower middle class, homely

because it was bound to be frugal, but refined because it was French.

The grosser manners which reflected accurately--as manner is wont

to do--the duller thoughts of our English lower middle class of a

hundred years since, would never have afforded to an artist who

desired inspiration from that class alone, such an opportunity as

was offered to Chardin by the lower _bourgeoisie_ of France. The

ruder civilisation of the London of that period provoked from English

art no such exquisite transcript. And had it come, it could hardly

have been welcomed, for in the two countries the taste of the day

was different--the one was finer than the other. A similarity in

coarseness, in imaginative Literature--the unquestioned grossness

of Rétif de la Bretonne, placed by the side of the grossness of

Smollett--may seem to deny it. But pictorial art makes the contrast

evident. In France it was possible not only for Chardin to exist, but

for him to be valued.

In a life that was eighty years long--a life mainly calm, and filled

with peaceful work--Chardin was of course able to accomplish much,

and to labour with variety; but whatever may have been his great

successes in other departments of Art than that of _genre_ painting,

it is by his mastery and originality in that that he may be expected

most to interest us. It was to that that he chiefly devoted the

middle years of his career. Other successes established his fame;

other successes came happily to its support, long afterwards, when he

was failing. We do not note, indeed, in Chardin, rapid transitions,

sudden transformations--the one occupation was apt to overlap the

other--but until we are to look into his course in great detail it may

be accepted as roughly true that it was first still-life that engrossed

him, then scenes of the domestic interior, and then, in the late days,

portraiture. Of the two first, he was a painter in oil. For the third

he employed pastel.

That, putting it briefly, was the course of his work. What was the

course of his life apart from work?--the course, I mean, of that second

life of the artist in painting or literature which is separate from

his production, yet must affect it so much? How about the people who

were nearest to him?--those whose society gave him his pleasure or

withheld it? Chardin was twice married. While he was still engaged in

the struggles of his youth, before his position was assured, he met a

young girl, Marguerite Saintar, at some modest merrymaking, where his

parents had planned that he should find her. Whether or not he knew

of their aims, his own wishes seemed to have been at one with theirs.

He liked Marguerite Saintar, who liked him in return. The attachment

appears indeed to have been so mutual that in their loves there was no

place for the proverb of the ‘one who kisses’ and ‘the other who holds

out the cheek.’

In 1728, Chardin being twenty-nine, he was received into the Academy,

and by 1731 he was permitted to marry the young woman to whom he was

devoted. She was still but twenty-two, but in the few years that they

had waited, their positions had a good deal changed. Chardin had won a

reputation to which already a certain modest money value was attached,

and the girl had lost her small fortune. The painter’s father was now

opposed to the marriage, but his objections were overcome. The couple

were wedded for but four years. Their only child, a son, remained to

Chardin, when his wife died, after a time of union troubled as to

outward matters, and which, in the wife’s declining health, it must

have needed either satisfied love or a happy temperament to make even

fairly bright. Chardin’s was a temperament of calm--the shrewd smiling

face, painted by himself when he was seventy years old, shows him yet

elastic and vivacious.

At forty-five--it was nine years after the close of the first domestic

episode--Chardin married a second time. Still in the parish of St.

Sulpice, to which from his youth he had been constant, he wedded a

youngish widow, Françoise Marguerite Pouget. Later, he was to paint,

in her agreeable features, a ‘rêve de femme et la philosophie de ses

quarante ans.’ She bore him company during the rest of his life, from

the days of his eminence to the days when fame forsook him. On the

whole he was fortunate. He worked so slowly and deliberately that it

would not have been easy for his painting to have made him rich, but

he had no unsatisfied ambitions, and he enjoyed his art and his home

and his assured friendships. No utterly disabling blow fell on him

till he had entered upon his later years. Then his son died, who had

been in a measure his pupil and follower. The remembrance of this, and

his own gathering age, and the neglect of his art, affected him in the

end, and he was a martyr to the disease which caused Bishop Butler, who

himself suffered from it, to say that the keenest physical pleasure in

life was the cessation of pain. In the last days dropsy followed upon

stone. On the 6th of December 1779, Doyen wrote to a familiar friend of

Chardin’s, M. Desfriches--‘Madame Chardin begs me to inform you of her

situation, which is very pitiable.’ The last sacrament had been given

to the aged painter. ‘M. Chardin a reçu le bon Dieu.’ ‘He is in a state

of exhaustion which causes the greatest anxiety.’ Later in the day he

died.

The placid and agreeable cheerfulness of Chardin’s temperament affords

some key to the things which his art chose, and the things which it

left aside. Contentment with the daily round, and with the common lot,

alone could have allowed him to confine the subject of his work within

the limits of a narrow experience. He painted what he saw, and he

saw the _bourgeoisie_, nor was he anxious to extend the field of his

vision. He is the artist of ‘Le Bénédicité,’ of ‘La Mère Laborieuse,’

of ‘L’Économe,’ of ‘La Bonne Éducation’--that is, he is the painter of

decent middle-class life, in its struggle with narrow means, and in

its happiness, which is that of the family and of tranquil and ordered

labour. Even the pursuits of his youth, when he painted still-life,

and the pursuits of his age, when he was drawing portraits, accorded

with that chronicle of the Parisian _bourgeoisie_ which was the work of

his mid-career; for the portraits were yet of everyday folk, and the

still-life, the fruits, the china, the copper vessels, the silk-lined

workboxes in whose familiar textures, colours, tones, his brushes

revelled so adroitly, were the natural accessories and accompaniments

of an existence led always within the limits of the home. Thus

regarded--and this is the fair way of looking at his course--there is

really no sudden change of route to be discovered in his artistic

progress. His was the record of the things he saw; but in his youth he

did not feel himself strong enough to portray, in what he saw, that

which was one day to interest him most--Humanity.

He began very humbly. It was in 1728, when he was but twenty-nine, that

his picture of ‘The Skate’ attracted some notice; and other objects of

still-life were grouped with it at the Exposition de la Jeunesse, in

the Place Dauphine, when M. Largillière--not a bad judge, one would

have thought--inspected his things, and, not knowing that they were

Chardin’s, protested that they must be the work of some very excellent

Dutchman, and that Chardin would be wise if he copied them. Soon after

that, as we have seen, he was accepted at the Academy, and from that

time forward he exhibited at the Louvre. An exhibitor for forty years,

he was for twenty years a hanger. That was a capacity in which he was

sure to make enemies; but at least he was never blamed for bestowing

unmerited prominence upon his own labours.

Chardin won, and he would have deserved to retain, a reputation by his

still-life pictures alone, for the truth is, none of the older Dutchmen

had conceived of common matter so nobly; and, sentiment apart, none had

brought to its representation a touch quite so large, a palette quite

so rich. To Chardin belongs at once a reality without meanness, and an

arrangement without pretension or artifice. The very gathering of his

groups of household things has a significance; it is characteristic; it

reveals in him that sense of human interest with which his forerunners

were scarcely occupied, and which we, in these later days, have missed

equally in men as different as Blaise Desgoffe and William Hunt. Into

Chardin’s pictures nothing is put thoughtlessly; and, possessed as he

was of a perception uniquely keen to note the varied individuality

of matter and its artistic interest, he yet had little of mere pride

in his ability to paint so well the object and the substance of

his choice. The simple materials gathered on his kitchen-slab have

their place there of right, and tell the story of modest and frugal

provision--from the little red jar of rough but highly glazed pottery,

to the eggs and the saucepan. In one picture there will be exactly the

material for the humblest meal, and the things that are required to

prepare it--that and no more--a transcript from his own limited home

in the early days, when he was an ill-rewarded painter and the husband

of an ailing young woman whose fortune was gone. In another, and it

is most likely of a later time, there are the fruits for the dessert

of the well-to-do, and with them is the silver and the gold, and the

sugar-bowl of now famous Dresden.

But though Chardin does justice to a luxury of colour, as in the

‘Goblet d’Argent,’ and in the picture--both are in the Salle Lacaze--of

the brown wooden jewel-box whose pale-blue soft silk lining catches

so discreet and delicate a light, the charm of the very simple never

escapes him. A tumbler of water and three tiny onions, and there is a

subject for Chardin. And in all the still-life of his earlier and of

his middle years there is an unfailing vigour of draughtsmanship, a

quiet truth of chiaroscuro, an effect of unforced picturesqueness; and

with easy decisiveness he executes intricate schemes of colour. His

hues, above all, are blended and fused; the influence of colour upon

the colour that is near it he is found to have studied to perfection.

He is a master of the elaborate interchange of reflections between

the silver cup and the glazed copper-hued pottery, on which its light

chances to play. And now the reflected light is cold and clear, and

now it is vague and warm. To see these things as Chardin saw them, is

really to see them for the first time. He opens to us, in a measure

that is entirely his own, the charm of the world of matter.

No engraving--hardly even the soft lights and the opulent shadows of

mezzotint--could render the character of this still-life of Chardin’s.

No etching, short of Jacquemart’s, could do justice to work in

itself so subtle, yet apparently so bold. But the manly and refined

line-engraving of the French engravers of the middle of the Eighteenth

Century was happily able to translate, with singular excellence, the

work of Chardin’s middle age, a work in which the rendering of matter

counted indeed for something, yet in which character, sentiment, story

counted also for much.

It was in 1734, and still at the Place Dauphine, that Chardin showed

that which seems to have been the first of his _genre_ pictures--a

picture of a woman sealing a letter. From that time onwards, to about

the beginning of his last decade, the painter’s work consisted chiefly

of the record of the daily life of the civilised _bourgeoisie_, on whom

Fortune never smiled too lavishly, but from whom she rarely turned with

a quite empty hand. The value of the _bourgeois_ virtues, of reticent

affection, of subdued love, of calm persistency in uneventful and

continually recurring labour, Chardin himself must have felt. Unlike

too many of his Dutch brethren, he saw life, and dealt with it, where

life was not gross. His children have an unconscious innocence along

with their reflectiveness; his boys are all ingenuous; his young women

bring the delightfulness of grace to the diligent doing of household

work in kitchen or parlour; and his seniors, in gaining experience,

have not lost sweetness.

And with the interest of pleasantness you have in Chardin’s case

the assurance of the interest of truth. Hogarth was as true, but he

was less pleasant; Morland was as pleasant, but he was less true.

Hogarth painted an individual; Morland generalised or idealised the

individual, and was contented with a type. Chardin’s figures do not

cease to be typical of the race, while they retain the delicate

accuracy of personal studies, and betray an untiring reference not

to a few models only, but to all the nature he lived amongst. Always

without exaggeration, always with directness and a deep simplicity,

the self-effacing art of Chardin accomplished its task, writing for

us in picture after picture, or print after print, the history of the

quietest of refined lives that the Eighteenth Century knew; arresting

for us the delicate gesture, in itself so slight, yet so completely

revealing; and tracing, on honest and sensitive faces, every expression

that rises above broad comedy, or falls short of high passion.

Unaccustomed though it was to the sincere portrayal of homely things,

Chardin’s own generation became quickly appreciative of the finest

phase of his art, and from 1738 to 1757 (as M. Emmanuel Bocher has

so laboriously and carefully recorded in a volume which is the

inevitable supplement to the De Goncourts’ literary study) the best

engravers of the time--Laurent Cars, Lépicié, Surugue, Le Bas, and

others besides--were busy in the translation of Chardin’s work. Such

accomplished draughtsmen with the burin could not fail, of course,

to express his obvious subject, and to retain in the black and white

of their copperplates the sentiment of the canvas. But they did more

than this--their flexible skill allowed them to retain often Chardin’s

manner and method; so that the very men who had rendered best, or as

well as the best, the trembling light of Watteau and his immense and

airy distance, with all its delicate gradations and infinite planes,

are found to be the complete interpreters of Chardin’s peculiar breadth

and simplicity, and of that deliberate firmness which is opposed the

most to Watteau’s masterly indecision. The low prices at which the

prints were issued made the prints saleable, and popularised Chardin’s

art among the educated middle class. Often but a couple of francs were

charged for an engraving worth, if it is in fine condition, three or

four guineas to-day.

Contemporary criticism, and especially the criticism of Diderot, was

favourable to Chardin, and may have assisted his fame. There were

years in which ‘the father of modern criticism,’ occupied as much with

intellectual charm and moral teaching as with technical perfection,

fairly raved over the painter whose work was the eulogium of the _tiers

état_. Lafont de St. Yonne, in 1746, places him very high in the ranks

‘des peintres compositeurs et originaux.’ In 1753, the Abbé le Blanc

writes of him--‘Il prend la nature sur le fait.’ And a few years later

it is Diderot who says: ‘It is always nature and truth. M. Chardin

is a man of mind. He understands the theory of his art.’ Again, ‘M.

Chardin is not a painter of history, but he is a great man.’ Then there

dawns upon the critical mind some sense that the painter is repeating

himself. From the old mint he reissues, with but slight modification,

the old coins. Still-life apart, he can give us no new subjects; and

the familiar ends by being undervalued, and the excellent is held

cheaply. At last, from Diderot, in 1767, there comes the undisguised

lamentation, ‘M. Chardin s’en va!’

Fortunately, however, though popularity passed from him, the old man

was able to interest himself in a fresh department of work. He had

painted a few portraits at an earlier time, but now his attention was

attracted to portraiture in pastel--that was the medium in which an

artist as masculine as himself, and as penetrating, had obtained an

admitted triumph; and why should Chardin fail where Quentin Latour had

brilliantly succeeded? Nor did he fail altogether. He was able to draw

back upon himself, in the last years, a little of the old attention.

And the pastel portraits, if they had the ‘_fragilité_’ had also the

‘_éclat_,’ which a well-known verse attributes to the then fashionable

method. And in subjects which were portraits only, the flesh tints were

no longer, by any possibility, effaced by the stronger reality which

somehow Chardin had been wont to bestow upon the accessories in his

pictures.

Pleasant to him and well merited as must have been that slight return

of appreciation which came to Chardin in his eighth decade, it is

not by the labour of that time that we are now likely to class him.

With the galvanised revival of a classical ideal, his name, after his

death, fell into dishonour. Some of his worthiest pictures tumbled,

neglected, about the quays of Paris. Only within the last quarter of a

century has there been evident the sign of an intention to do justice

to his work; and for us his principal distinction is, as I have said

already, that he is not only foremost, but was for years alone, in the

perception of the dignity and beauty of humble matter, and of the charm

which Art may discover in the daily incidents of the least eventful

life.

(_The Art Journal_, 1885.)