CHARDIN
Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin—a man of thebourgeoisie, 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 findmeans 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 agenre, 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 fromthat class alone, such an opportunity as was offered to Chardin by the lowerbourgeoisieof 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 ofgenrepainting, 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 occupationwas 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 agreeablefeatures, 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 thebourgeoisie, 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 Parisianbourgeoisiewhich 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 ofroute 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 representationa 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 thefruits 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 hisgenrepictures—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 civilisedbourgeoisie, on whom Fortune never smiled too lavishly, but from whom she rarely turned with a quite empty hand. The value of thebourgeoisvirtues, 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 werecharged 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 thetiers 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 passedfrom 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 lastquarter 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.)