Word: chardins
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...Chardin's art, in the twilight of a period stuffed with every kind of jerky innovation, narcissistic blurting and trashy "relevance," is to be reminded that lucidity, deliberation, unaffectedness, probity and calm are still the chief virtues of the art of painting. Chardin has long been a painter's painter, studied-and, when his work was cheap, collected-by other artists. He deeply affected at least three of the founders of modernism, Cėzanne, Matisse and Braque, and Van Gogh compared him to Rembrandt. What seized them in his work was not the humility of its subject...
...trace. The nurse in Meal for a Convalescent, who stands opening a boiled egg in a kind of reverential silence, like a secular descendant of Georges de la Tour's saints, is not a representative of the class war; the efforts of some historians to see Chardin's servants as emblems of an oppressed proletariat on the eve of the French Revolution are simply beside the point. A sense of social precariousness is the last thing one could expect to meet in a Chardin; indeed, one can hardly imagine him working without the conviction that...
...painter ever traveled less in search of nourishment. Apart from trips to Versailles, Chardin may not have left Paris once in all his years. He was a completely metropolitan man, a fact that seems oddly at variance with his paintings, since, as Pierre Rosenberg remarks, "one would like to imagine Chardin a solitary individual, a provincial...
...Chardin's prolonged meditation on brown crockery and the spiky fur of dead hares took place in the midst of an efflorescence of luxury art-pink bodies, swirling fronds of gold ornament, rinsed allegorical skies: the rococo style. It pervaded his milieu, and he did not despise it; but it was alien to his temperament...
This fixation on truth and nature endeared him to advanced thinkers in France, especially to Denis Diderot, compiler of the monumental Encyclopedia. "It is the chief business of art," Diderot declared in 1765, "to touch and to move, and to do this by getting close to nature." Chardin, Diderot said, epitomized that ambition at work: "Welcome back, great magician, with your mute compositions! How eloquently they speak to the artist! How much they tell him about the representation of nature, the science of color and harmony! How freely the air flows around these objects!" Few painters have ever had such...