by Brooke Chilvers
Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) is one of those 18th century French artists whose name always rings a bell among folks who even only occasionally visit museums.
In fact, because of his reputed limited creative reserves, he often made several versions of the same painting, so you can see his celebrated Soap Bubbles in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) in NYC, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC.
Chardin’s name also conjures up his quiet, carefully composed still lifes of earthenware jugs and copper cauldrons drawn from his own meagre household, such as Glass of Water and Coffee Pot. As his wealth and status grew from commissions, royalties from lithographs, royal pensions, and a second marriage to a well-to-do widow, his later laden sideboards, as in The Buffet Table (1763), offered Meissen or Chantilly porcelain and silver stoppers.
Unlike his contemporary royal painters of the hunt, Alexandre-François Desportes and Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Chardin never strove to attract sportsmen to his art; there are no hunting dogs or the taking down of stag. Instead, his unglamorous game pieces show ungutted rabbits and hares and blood-clotted pheasants hanging sacrificially, or laid out like a pièta on a cold stone ledge, as in The Silver Tureen, a.k.a. A Soup Tureen with a Cat Stalking a Partridge and Hare.
Chardin’s small oeuvre of 200 paintings struck an utterly different note from his Rococo contemporaries, Fragonard, Watteau and Boucher (see Jean Siméon Chardin – Who He Is Not). Yet the self-taught artist achieved recognition, success and prestige within the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which resulted in Louis XV granting him a pension (1752) and a free apartment for life in the artists’ wing of the Louvre (1756).
Jean-Siméon Chardin was born, baptized, married and buried all within walking distance of his Left Bank neighborhood, Saint-Germain-des-Près. In fact, the only time he ever left the city was to work for much-needed money, painting scenery at Versailles for the fireworks celebrating the birth of Louis XV’s son or assisting rococo artist Charles André van Loo restore the grand Italianate Galerie de François I at Fontainebleau.
The son from the second marriage of a master carpenter who specialized in making billiard balls for the royal family, at fourteen years old Jean Siméon was apprenticed to history painter and academy professor Pierre-Jacques Cazes whose students learned by copying their teacher’s dramatic mythological and biblical scenes. Soon enough, he was assisting the decorative painter of nymphs and Neptunes, Noël-Nicolas Coypel, with his still life motifs, which quickly turned him into a full-time working artist.
Although he was inscribed, in 1723, in the venerable Académie de Saint-Luc of the guild of painters and sculptors, it was still the Royal Academy’s biannual Salons that led artists to public acclaim and commissions. After hanging two works in the open-air, open-to-all Exposition de la Jeunesse at the Place Dauphine, in 1728, Chardin decided to submit them as the reception pieces required by the Academy’s judges. Almost unheard of, Chardin was admitted and elected as a member of the Royal Academy the same day, although ranked as a “painter of animals and fruits,” the very lowest rung on the hierarchy of worthy topics for an artist. Moralizing mythological, religious, and historical scenes, of course, occupied the top.
In 1730, Chardin attracted his first patron, Comte Conrad-Alexandre de Rothenbourg, Louis XV’s ambassador to the court of Spain, followed by Prince Joseph Wenzel of Lichtenstein, Louise Ulrique, future queen of Sweden, and Catherine the Great. After an eight-year engagement, this finally allowed him to marry, only for his wife to die two years later, followed their daughter two years after that. His son, artist Jean-Pierre, survived and went on to earn the Academy’s Prix de Rome but never produced a masterpiece. At forty-two, he drowned himself in a Venice canal.
From 1737 to the end of his life, Chardin exhibited at the Academy’s Salons, moving slightly up the ladder when he turned to painting portraits of intent young fellows spinning tops and holding instruments, and tranquil genre scenes of modest laundresses, embroiderers and mothers doing their daily household tasks with quiet dignity, as in The Turnip Scraper. Greatly pleasing to the expanding mercantile and bourgeois classes, forty-five such paintings became popular royalty-earning reproductions; still lifes were judged unsuitable for prints.
Chardin benefited from the change in taste when the aristocracy moved from Versailles back to Paris during the Regency (1715–1723). Smaller residences resulted in a revived interest in smaller, Dutch cabinet-style painting, with roots in 17th century Flemish still-life artists.
Despite his apparent success, Chardin could never become an Academy professor because he’d never actually attended classes there. Yet he was appointed Treasurer (1755–1774), and then tapissier (1761–1774), literally upholsterer, but meaning the unenviable responsibility for hanging the Salons’ hundreds of works by competing querulous artists, which he apparently did very well. Thus, it is fitting that Chardin’s remains are spending eternity in the parish church directly across the square from the Palais de Louvre.
In 2022, Chardin’s Basket of Wild Strawberries (1761) was sold at auction for 24.3 million Euros – the highest price ever paid at auction for an 18th century French painting. Over 10,000 donors raised 1.3 million Euros to help the Louvre block the sale to the Kimball Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.
