Works by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
79 works · 137 ms
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, a Paris cabinetmaker's son, painted fruit, kitchenware and household scenes in an age that counted such subjects minor beside history painting.
In The Ray a gutted fish hangs from a hook against a stone wall, its opened belly raw red, while a cat treads on oysters at the left. With it and Le Buffet he won admission to the Royal Academy in 1728. His early fame rested on animals and fruit; by the 1730s kitchen pots had come in, and figures soon after, supposedly because a portrait painter challenged him to try.
Still lifes make up about half of the works below and scenes with figures most of the rest. He repeated himself: nearly all his genre paintings exist in several versions, some hard to tell apart. The two Soap Bubbles below, both dated around 1733–34, show the same youth blowing a bubble over a stone sill, one framed by vines, the other cropped close. In The House of Cards, probably 1737, an adolescent adds to a row of standing cards. The theme came from Netherlandish vanitas pictures on the brevity of life, though his versions also take delight in childhood itself.
When his eyes began to fail in the 1770s, he took up pastel and drew himself and his wife. The self-portrait with a visor, about 1776, shows him in round spectacles and a knotted scarf, drawn in loose, open strokes. He made the composition as a pair with one of his wife; in Madame Chardin, 1776, she glances aside under a white cap tied with a blue ribbon.
Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago.
