Description
Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin (1) was born in Paris on November 2, 1699, the son of a master carpenter and billiard table maker. He served an apprenticeship with the history painter Pierre Jacques Cazes (1676-1754) and by 1720 was an assistant with the history painter Noël Nicolas Coypel (1690-1734), for whom he provided still-life additions for his paintings. In 1724, Chardin was admitted as a master in the painters’ guild, the Académie de Saint-Luc of Paris. In 1728, he exhibited an early still life, The Ray-Fish (2) at the Exposition de la Jeunesse, where he was widely praised for his mastery of realism. That same year, he was named Associate and Academician of the prestigious Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture on the basis of his still life, The Buffet. (3) This nomination was almost unprecedented for an artist who had not studied at the Academy. Beginning in 1737, when the Paris Salon reopened after a prolonged closure, Chardin was a regular participant at this juried Académie des Beaux-Arts exhibition. However, a serious illness in 1742 and his election as Adviser to the Royal Academy in 1743, greatly curtailed his painting, and he all but stopped exhibiting. In 1755 he was appointed Treasurer of the Academy, and in 1761 he assumed the role of arranging the Salon exhibitions. Chardin’s success and steady income came from aristocratic patrons, including Catherine the Great of Russia and the French King Louis XV, to whom he was presented in 1740 and who awarded him a pension in 1752 and granted him a studio and living quarters in the Louvre Palace in 1757. Unlike other artists of his generation, Chardin did not travel to Italy or any other European country and, in fact, spent almost his entire life in Paris. He died there on December 6, 1779.
Although Chardin found success with his still-lifes, which were widely praised, in 1733 he also took up genre painting, favoring the depiction of unsentimental domestic interiors. In these paintings he seems to have been strongly influenced by seventeenth-century Netherlandish painters such as Gabriël Metsu (1629-1667) and Pieter de Hooch (1629-1684). In both his still life and genre paintings, Chardin favored simple subjects and domestic themes and avoided the superficial treatment of the subject that had become popular in the Rococo period. Especially in his still lifes, Chardin evoked remarkably realistic textures by means of thick, layered brushstrokes beneath thin, luminous glazes. His method was to prime his canvas with brown pigment, sometimes tinted red or green, and then work up his subject beginning with the darker tones, then the mid-tones, and finally the highlights. He then would add color and create reflections and highlights that gave realism and three-dimensionality to the objects. Chardin was meticulous in maintaining an overall harmony in the coloration of the various objects and balance in the composition. His paintings are thus noteworthy for their formal structures and pictorial harmony. Unlike other artists, he made few, if any, preparatory drawings for his paintings.
Chardin frequently painted replicas of his compositions, especially his genre paintings, nearly all of which exist in multiple versions that are, in most cases, virtually identical to one another. (4) Chardin made copies, in part, because of his laborious working method and, in part, because of the success of certain of his paintings. The use of X-radiography in examining Chardin’s paintings provides evidence that his “original” versions have compositional reworkings (pentimenti), whereas the “copies” reveal no such changes. Whether the replicas were painted by Chardin or by another artist, perhaps in collaboration with Chardin, remains a matter of conjecture, although completely autograph copies are believed to exist. Moreover, Chardin did not maintain a true workshop, where assistants would likely be entrusted with making copies.
In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin painted a sizable number of small-scale still lifes that were a realistic counterfoil to the more frivolous and decorative subjects typically favored by painters of the Rococo period. His compositions of cooking utensils and meat and produce, arrayed in a seemingly casual manner, focused attention on the forms, colors, and textures of these simple objects as revealed in strongly raking light and against dark backgrounds in a manner reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting. Although Chardin initially was attentive to minute, realistic detail, his style in these still lifes eventually evolved into a more painterly and fluid representational manner.
Still Life with a Ray depicts a ray fish and a basket of onions, hanging from a hook, a chicken, eggs, a partially used round of cheese, a green jug, a copper pot, and a mortar and pestle on a stone ledge. At least nine nearly identical versions of Still Life with a Ray are known, (5) including a certainly autograph version, signed and dated 1731, in the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. (6) Other examples are in the Norton Simon Museum, Pasedena, (7) and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. (8) Mention of this composition and that of its pendant, Still Life with a Rib of Beef, in a pair or singly, has appeared in the literature since at least 1748 (9) when a pair appeared in the Godefroy Sale; however, it has so far proved impossible to ascertain which paintings are referred to by each of the documentary references. There also are several known versions of Still Life with a Rib of Beef. (10) This painting depicts a beef rib, hanging on a hook, a pottery tureen with a ladle, a brown jug with a lid at its side, a copper pot, white linen, two onions, and a bunch of leeks on a stone ledge. A version in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux, signed and dated 1730, and therefore one of Chardin's earliest dated kitchen still lifes, is most likely the primary version of this work. (11) In addition, there is a version in the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio, signed and dated 1739, (12) and a signed but undated version in the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena. (13) The Dumbarton Oaks version, signed by the otherwise unknown Jamin and dated 1743 makes it a somewhat later copy. Several other versions or copies are listed by Pierre Rosenberg. (14) The fact that Chardin's kitchen still lifes exist in multiple versions, occasionally employing minor compositional changes, attests to the popularity of these paintings, for which there apparently was a steady demand. The Dumbarton Oaks paintings are probably not by Chardin but by a close follower, likely the otherwise unknown Jamin whose signature appeared on Still Life with a Rib of Beef when it was cleaned in 1936, at which time a spurious signature of Chardin was removed.
In Still Life with a Rib of Beef, Chardin employed a triangular composition of muted browns, golds, and reds that were enlivened by punctuations of strong whites in the linens, animal fat, and leeks. This resulted in a simple compositional harmony of objects that otherwise might have seemed chaotic. He also endeavored to harmonize this painting with its pendant, Still Life with a Ray, where he employed a seemingly continuous stone pantry ledge on which the objects are arranged, an analogous triangular composition, similar color palette, and a second brass cauldron. In both compositions, one or more objects hang over the ledge, visually encroaching into the viewers’ space and leading the viewer’s eye into the paintings and linking all the objects together. Moreover, Chardin created a rhythmic alternation of softer organic forms and harder geometric shapes that play across the two canvases. These forms reveal themselves slowly as the objects emerge from the subtly-toned background.
(1) For Chardin’s life and work, see Pierre Rosenberg, Tout l'Oeuvre Peint de Chardin (Paris, 1983); Pierre Rosenberg, Chardin, Suivi du Catalogue des Oeuvres (Paris, 1999); Pierre Rosenberg and Florence Bruyant, Chardin (Paris, 1999); Pierre Rosenberg and Renaud Temperini, Chardin (Munich and New York, 2000); and Anne Dulau, ed., Boucher & Chardin, Masters of Modern Manners (Glasgow, 2008).
(2) Musée du Louvre, Paris, no. 3197 (dated by the museum ca. 1725-1726, oil on canvas, 114 x 146 cm).
(3) Musée du Louvre, Paris, no. 3198 (1728, oil on canvas, 194 x 129 cm).
(4) Rosenberg and Bruyant, Chardin, 68-70.
(5) See Rosenberg, Tout l'Oeuvre Peint de Chardin, 80, under no. 53, and Pierre Rosenberg, Chardin, 1699-1779 (Cleveland, 1980), 163. Versions of this composition more recently have been sold at auction: Christie’s, New York, on January 14, 1993, no. 101a (oil on canvas, 40 x 32 cm); Sotheby’s, London, on December 11, 1996, lot no. 311 (oil on canvas, 40.5 x 32 cm); and Sotheby’s, New York, on January 23, 2003, lot no. 203a (oil on canvas, 40.6 x 31.8 cm).
(6) No. 63.29.1 (1731, oil on canvas, 40.6 x 32.1 cm).
(7) No. F.1969.38.03.2.P (dated by the museum ca. 1728-1730, oil on canvas, 40.0 x 31.4 cm).
(8) Signed, oil on canvas, 51.5 x 32.5 cm.
(9) Kurt Martin, “Notes on a Still Life Painting by Chardin,” Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin vol. 9, no. 1 (Fall 1951), 21-22.
(10) Rosenberg, Chardin, 1699-1779, 160-161.
(11) No. 8483 (1730, oil on canvas, 40.5 x 32.5 cm).
(12) R. T. Miller Jr. Fund, 1945.32 (1739, oil on canvas, 41 x 34 cm). This painting differs slightly from the others by having a ladle resting across the eggs.
(13) No. F.1969.38.03.1.P (dated by the museum ca. 1728-1730, oil on canvas, 40.0 x 31.4 cm).
(14) Pierre Rosenberg, Chardin 1699-1779 (Paris, 1979), 60-61, under no. 35, and Rosenberg, Tout l’Oeuvre Peint de Chardin, 79-80, under no. 52.
J. Carder
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