Jean-Simeon Chardin was perhaps the greatest painter of the 18th century. Yet he was atypical, preferring everyday reality to the pompous historical and mythological themes then in fashion. Chardin's tranquil scenes of home life could not be more different from Boucher's voluptuous nudes and cherubs, from Fragonard's flirtatious ladies and Watteau's pastoral idylls.
"He is the painter of silence, peace, stillness, reflection . . . of modesty and chastity," says Pierre Rosenberg, director of the Louvre and the world's foremost expert on Chardin. To mark the 300th anniversary of Chardin's birth, Rosenberg, with the support of the LVMH luxury goods conglomerate, has brought together 96 Chardins in the main autumn exhibition at the Grand Palais until November 22nd. The exhibition will then travel to Dusseldorf, London and New York.
The editor of the Encylopedie, Denis Diderot, was one of the philosophes who admired Chardin. "So, here you are again, great magician, with your mute compositions!" Diderot wrote in his 1765 commentary on the annual artists' salon. Chardin was so attentive to reality that, Diderot recounted, he once abandoned a painting when the dead rabbits he was using as models began to rot. Other rabbits brought as replacements were simply not the right size or colour. The 20th century Franco-American writer, Julien Green, used to say, "What I love in Chardin's paintings is that he could not lie." There is not a hint of the rococo, not a trace of excess, in his canvases.
The fur on Chardin's rabbits looks so soft one could stroke it, the fruit in his still lifes so luscious you want to taste it. Yet, the paintings exude a gentle emotion.
"Who told you that one paints with colours?" Chardin once chided a contemporary. "You use colours, but you paint with feelings!"
In the wittiest, most sexually liberated of centuries, Chardin's peaceful images were nonetheless appreciated. Prints of his domestic scenes were widely circulated. In 1740, the artist was introduced to Louis XV, to whom he gave two paintings now on display at the Grand Palais. Grace shows a mother at a table with two children. In The Hard-working Mother, a woman sits before a spinning wheel, assisted by her daughter. The aristocracy craved these odes to ordinary life.
Chardin received commissions from Louis XV, from the courts of Austria, Sweden and Russia. Catherine the Great owned five Chardins, including the exquisite Little Girl with a Shuttlecock, which is the exhibition's signature painting, and which now belongs to the Rothschild family. Like all of the children in Chardin's paintings, the child is a miniature adult, dressed as a grown woman, serious and poised.
Despite his fame, Chardin was incapable of working quickly. Although he lived to the age of 80, his entire output counts only 200 paintings and he never became a rich man. Art historians attribute his habit of painting several copies of a painting to his desire to produce more, or his need to satisfy so many eager royal clients.
Critics of his day accused him of being slow and lazy. "I take time because it is my habit never to leave my works until, in my eyes, they leave nothing more to be desired," Chardin responded. Unlike most 18th-century French painters, Chardin never studied in Italy. The son of a carpenter who made billiards tables, he was largely self-taught and spent his entire life within a few square kilometres between the Louvre and Saint-Sulpice Church on the Left Bank.
The mischievous cats, alert hunting dogs and pensive women and children in his paintings betray no sign of the tragedy which stalked him. He buried his first wife, and two of his three children died in infancy. His third child, a son named Jean-Pierre, became a painter, though less successful than his father. They quarrelled over money, and probably over aesthetics - Jean-Pierre Chardin produced the sort of fashionable historical paintings his father hated. In a probable suicide, the younger Chardin drowned in a Venice canal in 1772.
In the last decade of his life, Chardin's eyesight began failing. He abandoned oils for pastel crayons and, for the second time, set aside still lifes to paint only human figures. His self-portraits, and a portrait of his wife, reveal nothing of his inner thoughts. The mysterious expression on the old man's face - rakishly wearing a pink scarf around his neck and a nightcap tied down with blue ribbon - has fascinated artists and writers.
"He's a crafty old man, this painter," Cezanne wrote in 1904. Marcel Proust found him "comical as an old English tourist" and wondered whether he was looking at "the boisterousness of an old man who doesn't take himself too seriously". To Proust, the ageing painter seemed to say, "Ah! So you think you're the only young ones left?"
