Baroque Age
Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779)
Rococo and the French Eighteenth Century painter.
Jean-Siméon Chardin, born in Paris in 1699, was the quiet conscience of the French eighteenth century — a painter of kitchens, larders, and modest households who worked against the grain of an age given to fêtes galantes and powdered flirtation. The son of a cabinetmaker, he made his reputation with still lifes so convincing that he was received into the Académie Royale in 1728 as 'a painter skilled in animals and fruit,' a category that undersold the profound stillness of his art.
From the 1730s he added figure paintings of unassuming domestic life — a boy blowing a soap bubble, a mother saying grace with her children, a servant returning from market — rendered with the same grave attention he gave to a copper pot or a dead hare. He built his surfaces slowly, in small granular touches that dissolve, at a distance, into the very substance of bread, glass, and fur. The critic Denis Diderot, who adored him, marvelled that Chardin seemed to take the air and light itself on the tip of his brush.
Honoured with lodgings in the Louvre and a royal pension, Chardin nonetheless remained a painter of humble subjects to the end. When failing eyesight made oil painting difficult in his last decade, he turned to pastel and produced a handful of unsparing self-portraits — a man in a nightcap and spectacles, looking hard at his own aging face. He died in Paris in 1779, his reputation later eclipsed and then, in the nineteenth century, triumphantly restored.
The words the record keeps using: quiet, grave, tender, unhurried, truthful, harmonious, contemplative, humble.
At a glance
- Lived 1699–1779
- Origin French
- Worked in Paris
- Era Baroque Age
- Movements Rococo and the French Eighteenth Century
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Pastel
- Techniques Chiaroscuro, Impasto
Works in the archive
- The Ray (La Raie), 1725 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
One of the two reception pieces that won Chardin his place in the Académie, this large kitchen still life is dominated by a gutted skate hung on a hook, its pale wound and strangely human 'face' at the center, flanked… - Soap Bubbles, 1733 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
A young man leans out of a stone window, absorbed in blowing a single trembling soap bubble, while a small child peers over the sill to watch. The subject is a gentle vanitas — the bubble, like youth and life, is… - Saying Grace (Le Bénédicité), 1740 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
A mother sets the midday meal while her two small daughters wait, the youngest prompted to say grace before eating. The scene of ordinary domestic piety and care was among Chardin's most admired and most engraved; he… - The Silver Goblet (Le Gobelet d'argent), 1768 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
A late, distilled still life: a dented silver goblet, three apples, a couple of chestnuts, and a spoon on a plain ledge. There is almost no incident — only the cool gleam of the metal, the matte skins of the fruit, and… - Self-Portrait with Spectacles, 1771 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
In old age, his eyesight failing for fine oil work, Chardin turned to pastel and drew himself in a knotted headscarf and eyeshade, steel spectacles perched on his nose. Frank, faintly quizzical, and utterly without…
What was said
In his Salon reviews Diderot championed Chardin above the fashionable painters, praising the truth, harmony, and near-magical substance of his humble subjects — famously marvelling that it was not white, red, and black that Chardin ground on his palette but the very substance of things, the air and the light he seemed to take on the tip of his brush.
In his memorial essay on the painter, Chardin's friend the engraver Charles-Nicolas Cochin described his slow, laborious method and reported his conviction that although one uses colours, one paints with feeling — a remark scholars caution comes to us through Cochin rather than in Chardin's own hand.
The records of the Académie Royale note Chardin's reception in 1728 as a painter of animals and fruit on the strength of two still lifes, The Ray and The Buffet — an unusually humble specialty for academic membership, which he elevated over the following decades.
What would Jean-Siméon make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Jean-Siméon Chardin", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Jean-Siméon · Keep a life moment the way Jean-Siméon would · Pictures made after Jean-Siméon