On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

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 agreeable features, 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 the bourgeoisie, 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 Parisian bourgeoisie which 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 of route 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 representation a 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 the fruits 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 his genre pictures—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 civilised bourgeoisie, on whom Fortune never smiled too lavishly, but from whom she rarely turned with a quite empty hand. The value of the bourgeois virtues, 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 were charged for an engraving worth, if it is in fine condition, three or four guineas to-day.