Chardin, Jean Baptiste Simeon

Discoveries: Chardin: An Intimate Art (Discoveries (Abrams))

Charming yet scholarly, this book explores the work of the French artist Jean Baptiste Simon Chardin, who brought a breath of fresh air to 18th-century painting. His masterful sense of color and light filled his simple domestic interiors and delicate renderings of still lifes with a profound humanism. A major Chardin exhibition opens in June 2000 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

126 illustrations, 86 in full color, 5 x 7"

The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting

This inviting book offers the first comprehensive survey of French genre painting of the eighteenth century, from Watteau's fêtes galantes to Boilly's paintings of modern Parisian life. Showcasing 113 works, the book illustrates the variety and the vitality of genre painting throughout the period. Leading English, German, French, and American scholars shed light on the development of genre painting, its interpretation, its collectors, and its enormous appeal. Here are gathered together masterpieces by such eminent artists as Watteau, Lancret, de Troy, Chardin, Boucher, Greuze, Fragonard, Robert, and Boilly. The wide range of their featured works encompasses military scenes, theatrical subjects, hunt pictures, pastorals, domestic life, moral pictures, fishwife subjects, paintings for the boudoir, and panoramas of the Enlightenment in landscapes and townscapes. Each work is thoroughly catalogued, and an appendix lists all genre paintings shown in the eighteenth-century Salons.

Chardin

Pierre Rosenberg, the Chardin scholar and President-Director of the Musée du Louvre, had one overriding goal in mind when assembling the exhibition of which Chardin is the catalog: "to present the artist's finest paintings, the most perfect, the most harmonious, the paintings that leave nothing to be desired." The 99 paintings reproduced in this book are a testimony to the success of that endeavor. There are also six essays by Chardin experts and an extensively researched chronology.

Chardin's still lifes and genre scenes have been deeply appreciated for centuries for what Rosenberg calls "the grave, silent quality that encourages the onlooker to silent reverie." He is incapable of untruth: his subjects--jugs and bowls, glasses, cherries, housemaids, boys at play, dogs and cats--are painted without a touch of irony, embellishment, or drama.

It is painful to report that this volume is extremely disappointing visually, with plates that are either poorly reproduced or reproduced from poor transparencies and are slightly greenish or washed out. Except for details, which do show Chardin's close harmonies and painterly touch, the pictures look flat and dull. Art historians, of course, will see the paintings in the flesh and use this book as only an aide-memoire, but for ordinary, nonprofessional art lovers, the 20-year-old catalog of the great 1979 Chardin exhibition gives a far better sense of the quiet perfection of this subtle artist. Even a pocket book from Abrams' Discoveries series, Chardin: An Intimate Art, by Helene Prigent and Pierre Rosenberg, is far superior. Although its reproductions are minuscule by comparison, they are at least clear and clean, with colors that appear to be close to those of the original works. The little book may be only an hors d'oeuvre, but it has all the flavor that is missing in the full-course meal. --Peggy Moorman

Jean Simeon Chardin (1699-1779) started his career with a great interest in still life, a subject held in particularly low regard by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. According to the Academy, the most important paintings contained human figures (most highly ranked were mythological or historical subjects) and paintings with no human figures were at the bottom of the hierarchy. As the Academy exerted an enormous influence, truly making or breaking an artist's career. Aware of this hierarchy, Chardin began including figures in his work in about 1730, mainly women and children. These scenes of domestic interiors were unprecedented because Chardin gave them a greater intensity and intimacy than the usual lighthearted depiction of everyday life. Chardin's technique also set him apart from his contemporaries, as he did not prepare for a painting by doing many drawings or studies, but rather started right on the canvas itself. Diderot once called Chardin the 'great magician' because of the way he united color, composition and subject. With 100 colour illustrations of Chardin's work and six essays by leading experts in the field, the book will discuss his biography, his use of ceramics and glass and the complex history of engravings of his paintings.

Chardin: Colour Library (Phaidon Colour Library)

Pierre Rosenberg, the Chardin scholar and President-Director of the Mus+¬e du Louvre, had one overriding goal in mind when assembling the exhibition of which Chardin is the catalog: "to present the artist's finest paintings, the most perfect, the most harmonious, the paintings that leave nothing to be desired." The 99 paintings reproduced in this book are a testimony to the success of that endeavor. There are also six essays by Chardin experts and an extensively researched chronology.Chardin's still lifes and genre scenes have been deeply appreciated for centuries for what Rosenberg calls "the grave, silent quality that encourages the onlooker to silent reverie." He is incapable of untruth: his subjects--jugs and bowls, glasses, cherries, housemaids, boys at play, dogs and cats--are painted without a touch of irony, embellishment, or drama. It is painful to report that this volume is extremely disappointing visually, with plates that are either poorly reproduced or reproduced from poor transparencies and are slightly greenish or washed out. Except for details, which do show Chardin's close harmonies and painterly touch, the pictures look flat and dull. Art historians, of course, will see the paintings in the flesh and use this book as only an aide-memoire, but for ordinary, nonprofessional art lovers, the 20-year-old catalog of the great 1979 Chardin exhibition gives a far better sense of the quiet perfection of this subtle artist. Even a pocket book from Abrams' Discoveries series, Chardin: An Intimate Art, by Helene Prigent and Pierre Rosenberg, is far superior. Although its reproductions are minuscule by comparison, they are at least clear and clean, with colors that appear to be close to those of the original works. The little book may be only an hors d'oeuvre, but it has all the flavor that is missing in the full-course meal. --Peggy Moorman

Jean Simeon Chardin 1699-1779

Chardin

First published in France in 1994, Chardin expands on the work of Georges Wildenstein in the 1933 book, Chardin, and Pierre Rosenberg's catalog for the great Chardin exhibition of 1979. Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin was largely a self-taught painter who took the Academy of Painting by storm in 1728 despite the lowly status enjoyed by most still-life painters in his day. Though he rescued the academy's finances and won great artistic influence, he was never allowed to teach and was denied the academy's higher honors because he was a "painter of animals and fruit." Even so, for 20 years he performed the important task of hanging salon exhibits. Chardin examines the painter's career through his paintings and the writings of his contemporaries.

Chardin and the Still-Life Tradition in France (Themes in Art)

Boucher and Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners (Hunterian Museum, Glasgow)

Boucher and Chardin examines the relationships between two iconic images of French art of the 18th century: Woman Taking Tea (1735) by Jean-Siméon Chardin and its pair, Madame Boucher (1743) by François Boucher. Both paintings are believed to represent the respective artists' wives. When considered together, the two paintings acquire a new resonance, showing the imaginative and Parisian response of two very different painters to a new interest in scenes from everyday life.

The paintings are examined in the context of a dozen further works by the artists, and prints, drawings, books, and decorative art objects including oriental textiles and porcelain. This provides an opportunity to address undercurrent social history themes, such as the artists' attitudes to fashion, interior decoration, and even the consumption of tea. Christoph Martin Mogtherr writes on genre painting of the period, and Ann Eatwell on the fashion for tea and its "equipage" in London and Paris.

The splendid Chardin.: An article from: New Criterion

This digital document is an article from New Criterion, published by Foundation for Cultural Review on September 1, 2000. The length of the article is 4757 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The splendid Chardin.
Author: Karen Wilkin
Publication: New Criterion (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 1, 2000
Publisher: Foundation for Cultural Review
Volume: 19 Issue: 1 Page: 40

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Jean-Simeon Chardin: L'Homme Et LA Legende (Poche Couleur)