Word: chardin
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Unfortunately, some of this is lost in the Cleveland installation, which denies the paintings the daylight they need, and bathes everything in electric glare. What remains unmistakable is the way Chardin extended his ideal of the family to include groups of objects as well as people. Once one has been through the show, the props of his still lifes, which were also the normal appurtenances of his home life, become like familiar faces: the patriarchal mass of his copper water urn, perched on its squat tripod; the white teapot with its rakish finial; the painted china that signaled his growing...
...what is rarer, their praise was deserved. For Chardin had two great gifts. The first was his ability to absorb himself in the visual to the point of self-effacement. Now and again, as in his Basket of Wild Strawberries-the glowing red cone, compressing the effulgence of a volcano onto a kitchen table, balanced by two white carnations and the cold, silvery transparencies of a water glass-the sense of rapture is delivered almost before the painting is grasped...
...fervor of this painting, almost literally an opposition of fire and ice, is comparatively rare in Chardin's output. Generally his still lifes declare themselves more slowly. One needs to savor the Jar of Apricots, for instance, before discovering its resonances, which are not only visual but tactile: how the tambour lid of the round box accords with the oval shape of the canvas itself and is echoed by the drumlike tightness of the paper tied over the apricot jar; how the horizontal axis of the table is played upon by the stuttering line of red-wineglass, fruit...
This patient construction, this sense of the intrinsic worth of seeing, combines with Chardin's second gift: his remarkable feeling for the poetic (rather than didactic) moments of human gesture. It permeates his genre scenes and portraits, especially the portraits of children; the gentle muteness that Diderot perceived often turns into a noble ineloquence, as though Piero della Francesca were visiting the nursery. In some way Chardin's absorption in the act of painting paralleled the absorption of children in their games, which he painted. One has only to look at the figure in his portrait Little Girl...
There are almost no precedents in earlier art for Chardin's extraordinary blend of intimacy and decorum; and to find anything like it in later painting, one must go forward a century to impressionism, without often finding its equal there...