Part 2

"Le Bénédicité," or "Grace before Meat," is perhaps the most popular and best known of all Chardin's domestic genre pieces. It combines the highest technical and artistic qualities with a touching simplicity of sentiment that must endear it even to those who cannot appreciate its artistry. Several replicas of it are known, but the original is probably the version in the Hermitage Collection at St. Petersburg. The Louvre owns two examples--one from the collection of Louis XV., another from the La Caze Collection. This latter version appeared three times in the Paris sale-rooms, the last time in 1876, when it realised the sum of £20! Another authentic replica is in the Marcille Collection, and yet another at Stockholm.]

Let us now listen to Diderot, though in fairness it should be stated that the remarks which follow refer to Chardin's later work between 1761 and 1767. First of all he is set down as "ever a faithful imitator of Nature in his own manner, which is rude and abrupt--a nature low, common, and domestic." A strange pronouncement on the part of the same ill-balanced critic who, four years later, condemned Boucher because "in all this numberless family you will not find one employed in a real act of life, studying his lesson, reading, writing, stripping hemp." Thus Chardin's vice is turned into virtue when it is a question of abusing a master who avoided the "low, common, and domestic." In his topical criticism on the Salon of 1761 Diderot tells us of Chardin, that it is long since he has "finished" anything; that he shirks trouble, and works like a man of the world who is endowed with talent and skill. In 1765 Diderot utters the following curious statement: "Chardin's technique is strange. When you are near you cannot distinguish anything; but as you step back the objects take form and begin to be real nature." On a later occasion he describes Chardin's style as "a harsh method of painting with the thumb as much as with the brush; a juxtaposition of touches, a confused and sparkling accumulation of pasty and rich colours." Diderot is borne out by Bachaumont who at the same period writes: "His method is irregular. He places his colours one after the other, almost without mixing, so that his work bears a certain resemblance to mosaic, or _point carré_ needlework." This description, given by two independent contemporaries, almost suggests the technique of the modern impressionists and pointillists; and if the present appearance of Chardin's paintings scarcely tallies with Diderot's and Bachaumont's explanation, it should not be forgotten that a century and a half have passed over these erstwhile "rude and violent" mosaics of colour touches, and that this stretch of time is quite sufficient to allow the colours to re-act upon each other--in a chemical sense, to permeate each other, to fuse and blend, and to form a mellow, warm, harmonious surface that shows no trace of harsh and abrupt touches. Thus it would appear that Chardin discounted the effects of time and worked for posterity. In one of his rare happy moments Diderot realised this fact, and took up the cudgels for our master. In his critique of the 1767 Salon he explains that "Chardin sees his works twelve years hence; and those who condemn him are as wrong as those young artists who copy servilely at Rome the pictures painted 150 years ago."

II

Chardin's physical appearance, such as we find it in authentic portraits, his character, as it is revealed to us by his words and his actions, and the whole quiet and comparatively uneventful course of his life, are in most absolute harmony with his art. Indeed, Chardin's personality might, with a little imagination, be reconstructed from his pictures. He was a bourgeois to the finger-tips--a righteous, kind-hearted, hard-working man who never knew the consuming fire of a great passion, and who was apparently free from the vagaries, inconsistencies, and irregularities usually associated with the artistic temperament. Though never overburdened with the weight of worldly possessions, he was never in real poverty, never felt the pangs of hunger. He had as good an education as his father's humble condition would permit, and his choice of a career not only met with no opposition, but was warmly encouraged. In his profession he rose slowly and gradually to high honour, and never experienced serious rebuffs or checks. His disposition was not of the kind to kindle enmity or even jealousy. His early affection for the girl who was to become his first wife was faithful, but not of the kind to prompt him to hasty action--he waited until his financial position enabled him to keep a modest home, and then he married. He married a second time, nine years after his first wife's death, and this time his choice fell upon a widow with a small fortune, a practical shrewd woman, who was of no little help to him in the management of his affairs. It was not exactly a love match, but the two simple people suited each other, were of the same social position, and in similar comfortable circumstances, and managed to live peacefully and contentedly in modest bourgeois fashion.

How dull, how bald, how negative the smooth course of this life of virtue and honest labour seems, contrasted with the eventful, stormy, passionate life of a Boucher or a Fragonard who were in the stream of fashion, and adopted the manner and licentiousness and vices of their courtly patrons. There is never an immodest thought, never a piquant suggestion in Chardin's paintings. They reflect his own life; perhaps they represent the very surroundings in which he spent his busy days, for we find in their sequence the clear indication of growing prosperity from a condition which verges on poverty--respectable, not sordid, poverty--to comparative luxury; from drudgery in kitchen and courtyard to tea in the cosy parlour. There can be but little doubt that many a time the master's brush was devoted to the recording of his own home, his own family, the even tenor of his life.

The man's character--and more than that, his _milieu_--are expressed in no uncertain fashion in his three auto-portraits, two of which are at the Louvre, and one in the Collection of M. Léon Michel-Lévy. A good, kind-hearted, simple-minded man he appears in these pastel portraits, which all date from the last years of his life, a man incapable of wickedness or meanness, and endowed with a keen sense of humour that lingers about the corners of his mouth. It is a face that immediately enlists sympathy by its obvious readiness for sympathy with others. And so convincing are these portraits in their straightforward bold statement, that they may be accepted as documentary testimony to the man's character, even if we had not the evidence of Fragonard's much earlier portrait of Chardin, which was until recently in the Rodolphe Kann Collection, and is at present in the possession of Messrs. Duveen Bros. With the exception of such differences as may be accounted for by the differences of age, all these portraits tally to a remarkable degree. The features are the same, and the expression is identical--the same keen, penetrating eyes, which even in his declining years have lost none of their searching intelligence, even though they have to be aided by round horn-rimmed spectacles; the same revelation of a lovable nature, even though in M. Michel-Lévy's version worry and suffering have left their traces on the features. He is the embodiment of decent middle-class respectability. Decency and a high sense of honour marked every act of his life, and decency had to be kept up in external appearances. On his very deathbed, when he was tortured by the pangs of one of the most terrible of diseases, dropsy having set in upon stone, he still insisted upon his daily shave!

Yet Chardin, the bourgeois incarnate, was anything but a Philistine. From this he was saved by his life-long devotion to, and his ardent enthusiasm for, his art. He was not given to bursts of the theatrical eloquence that is so dear to the men of his race; but the scanty records we have of his sayings testify to the humble, profound respect in which he held the art of painting. "Art is an island of which I have only skirted the coast-line," runs the often quoted phrase to which he gave utterance at a time when he had attained to his highest achievement. To an artist who talked to him about his method of improving the colours, he replied in characteristic fashion: "And who has told you, sir, that one paints with colours?" "With what then?" questioned his perplexed interviewer. "One _uses_ colours, but one paints with feeling."

Brilliant technician as he was, and admirable critic of his own and other artists' work, Chardin lacked the gift to communicate his knowledge to others. He was a bad teacher--he was a wretched teacher. Even such pliable material as Fragonard's genius yielded no results to his honest efforts. It was Boucher who, at the height of his vogue and overburdened with commissions that did not allow him the time to devote himself to the nursing of a raw talent, recommended Fragonard to work in Chardin's studio; but six months' teaching by the master failed to bring out the pupil's brilliant gifts. Chardin knew not how to impart his marvellous technique to young Fragonard, and Fragonard returned to Boucher without having appreciably benefited by Chardin's instruction. The master had no better luck with his own son, though in this case the failure was due rather to lack of talent than to bad teaching, for Van Loo and Natoire were equally unsuccessful in their efforts to develop the unfortunate young man's feeble gifts. There is a touch of deepest pathos in the reference made by Chardin to his son at the close of an address to his Academic colleagues in 1765: "Gentlemen, gentlemen, be indulgent! He who has not felt the difficulty of art does nothing that counts; he who, like my son, has felt it too much, does nothing at all. Farewell, gentlemen, and be indulgent, be indulgent!"

Chardin had no artistic progeny to carry on his tradition, partly, perhaps, because he failed as a teacher, more probably because the Revolution and the Empire were close at hand when he died, and because the social upheavals led to new ideals and to an art that was based on an altogether different æsthetic code. The star of David rose when Chardin's gave its last flickers; and Chardin himself was among the commissioners who signed on the 10th of January 1778 the highly laudatory report on David's large battle sketch sent to Paris by the Director of the School of Rome. Yet who would venture to-day to mention the two in the same breath. David has fallen into well-deserved oblivion, and the example of Chardin's glorious paintings has done what was beyond the master's own power--it has created a School that is daily enlisting an increasing number of highly gifted followers. Chardin's name is honoured and revered in every modern painter's studio.

III

Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin was born in Paris on November 2, 1699, the second son of Jean Chardin, cabinetmaker, or to be more strict, billiard-table maker, a hard-working man who rose to be syndic of his corporation, but who, the father of a family of five, was fortunately not sufficiently prosperous to give his son a literary education. I say fortunately, because it was probably his ignorance of mythology and classic lore that made Chardin, who often bitterly regretted his educational deficiencies, turn his attention to those subjects which required a keenly observing eye and a sure hand, and not a fertile imagination stimulated by book-knowledge. His lack of education saved Chardin from allegorical and mythological clap-trap, and made him the great painter of the visible world of his time. Though Jean Chardin wanted his son to take up his own profession, he was quick in recognising and encouraging the boy's early talent, and finally made him enter the Atelier of Pierre Jacques Cazes where Siméon received his first systematic training. Cazes was a capable enough painter in the traditional grand manner of Le Brun, which had been taught to him by Bon Boullogne. He had taken the Prix de Rome, and issued victorious from several other competitions, but, like Rigaud and Largillière and several other distinguished painters of the period, never availed himself of the privilege entailed by the award of the Prix de Rome. Indeed, he was not a little proud of this fact, as he showed by his reply to Crozat who commiserated with him for having never seen the Italian masterpieces--"I have proved that one can do without them." Yet whatever merit there may have been in Cazes' work, and whatever may have been his own opinion on this subject, prosperity came not his way; and although he was appointed Professor at the Academy, and rose to great popularity as a teacher, he remained so poor that he could not afford to provide his pupils with living models. They had to learn what they could from copying their master's compositions and studies.

The copying of designs, based on literary conceptions and knowledge of the classics, could not possibly be either beneficial or attractive for a youth who lacked the education needed for understanding these subjects, and who was, moreover, deeply interested in the life that came under his personal observation. The tasks set to him by Cazes must have appeared to Chardin like the drudgery of acquiring proficiency in a hieroglyphic language that conveyed no definite meaning to him. Still, Chardin made such progress under his first master that Noël Nicolas Coypel engaged him as assistant to paint the details in some decorative over-door panels representing the Seasons and the Pleasures of the Chase.

In Coypel Chardin found a master of very different calibre--a teacher after his own heart. The systematised knowledge of the principles adopted by the late Bolognese masters, rules of composition and of the distribution of light and shade, were certainly of little use to him when, on beginning his work in Coypel's studio, he was set the task of painting a gun in the hand of a sportsman. Chardin was amazed at the trouble taken by his employer, and at the amount of thought expended by him upon the placing and lighting of the object. The painting of this gun was Chardin's first valuable lesson. He was made to realise the importance of a comparatively insignificant accessory. He was shown how its position would affect the rhythm of the design. He was taught to paint with minute accuracy whatever his eye beheld. He was told, perhaps for the first time, that it was not enough to paint a hieroglyphic that will be recognised to represent a gun, but that the paint should express the true appearance of the object, its plastic form, its surface, the texture of the material, the play of light and shade and reflections. The lesson of this gun gave the death blow to traditional recipes, and laid the foundation of Chardin's art.

Chardin did well under the new tuition, so well that Jean-Baptiste Van Loo engaged him to help in the restoration of some paintings in the gallery of Fontainebleau. It must have been a formidable task, since not only Chardin, but J. B. Van Loo's younger brother Charles and some Academy students were made to join the master's staff. Five francs a day and an excellent dinner on the completion of the work were the wages for the job which in some way was a memorable event in our master's life. With the exception of a visit to Rouen in his old age, the trip to Fontainebleau afforded Chardin the only glimpse he ever had of the world beyond Paris and the surrounding district.

The first record we have of Chardin's independent activity has reference to an astonishing piece of work which has disappeared long since, but is known to us from an etching by J. de Goncourt. The work in question was a large signboard, 14 feet 3 inches long by 2 feet 3 inches wide, commissioned from him by a surgeon who was on terms of friendship with Chardin's father. Perhaps the young artist had seen Watteau's famous signboard for Gersaint, now in the German Emperor's Collection. However this may be, like Watteau he departed from the customary practice of filling the board with a design made up of the implements of the patron's craft,[1] and painted an animated street scene, representing the sequel to a duel. The scene is outside the house of a surgeon who is attending to the wound of the defeated combatant, whilst a group of idle folk of all conditions, attracted by curiosity, have assembled in the street, and are watching the proceedings, and excitedly discussing the occurrence. Although Goncourt's etching naturally gives no indication of the colour and technique of this remarkable and unconventional painting, it enables us to see the very natural and skilful grouping and the excellent management of light and shade which Chardin had mastered even at that early period.

The sign was put up on a Sunday, and attracted a vast crowd whose exclamations induced the surgeon to step outside his house and ascertain the cause of the stir. Being a man of little taste, his anger was aroused by Chardin's bold departure from convention, but the general approval with which the _quartier_ greeted Chardin's original conception soon soothed his ruffled spirit, and the incident led to no further unpleasantness.

Save for the story of the surgeon's sign, nothing is known of Chardin's doings from his days of apprenticeship to his first appearance, in 1728, at the _Exposition de la Jeunesse_, a kind of open-air Salon without jury, held annually in the Place Dauphine on Corpus Christi day, between 6 A.M. and midday, "weather permitting." With the exception of the annual Salon at the Louvre, which was only open to the works of the members of the Academy, this _Exposition de la Jeunesse_ was the only opportunity given to artists for submitting their works to the public. At the time when Chardin made his début at this picture fair, the annual Academy Salon instituted by Louis XIV. had been abandoned for some years, so that even the members of the Academy were driven to the Place Dauphine in order to keep in touch with the public. In the contemporary criticisms of the _Mercure_ the names of all the greatest French masters of the first half of the eighteenth century are to be found among the exhibitors of the _Jeunesse_--the shining lights of the profession, Coypel, Rigaud, De Troy, among the crowd of youngsters eager to make their reputation. Lancret, Oudry, Boucher, Nattier, Lemoine--none of them disdained to show their works under conditions which had much more in common with those that obtain at an annual fair, than with those we are accustomed to associate with a picture exhibition. The spectacle of dignified Academicians thus seeking public suffrage in the street finally induced Louis de Boullogne, Director of the Academy, to seek for an amelioration of the prevailing conditions, and thanks to the intervention of the Comptroller-general of the King's Buildings the Salon of the Louvre was re-opened in 1725 for a term of four days--"outsiders" being excluded as of yore.

On Corpus Christi day, 1728, Chardin, then in his twenty-ninth year, availed himself for the first time of the opportunity given to rising talent, and made his appearance at the Place Dauphine with a dozen still-life paintings, including "The Skate" and "The Buffet"--the two masterpieces which are counted to-day among the treasured possessions of the Louvre. This sudden revelation of so personal and fully developed a talent caused no little stir. Chardin was hailed as a master worthy to be placed beside the great Netherlandish still-life painters, and was urged by his friends to "present himself" forthwith at the Academy. Chardin reluctantly followed the advice, and, having arranged his pictures ready for inspection in the first room of the Academy at the Louvre, retired to an adjoining apartment, where he awaited, not without serious misgivings, the result of his bold venture.

His fears proved to be unfounded. A contemporary of Chardin's has left an amusing account of what befell our timid artist. M. de Largillière entered the first room and carefully examined the pictures placed there by Chardin. Then he passed into the next room to speak to the candidate. "You have here some very fine pictures which are surely the work of some good Flemish painter--an excellent school for colour, this Flemish school. Now let us see your works." "Sir, you have just seen them." "What! these were your pictures?" "Yes, sir." "Then," said Largillière, "present yourself, my friend, present yourself." Cazes, Chardin's old master, likewise fell into the innocent trap, and was equally complimentary, without suspecting the authorship of the exposed pictures. In fact, he undertook to stand as his pupil's sponsor. When Louis de Boullogne, Director of the Academy and painter to the king, arrived, Chardin informed him that the exhibited pictures were painted by him, and that the Academy might dispose of those which were approved of. "He is not yet 'confirmed' (_agréé_) and he talks already of being 'received' (_reçu_)![2] However," he added, "you have done well to mention it." He reported the proposal, which was immediately accepted. The ballot resulted in Chardin being at the same time, "confirmed" and "received." On Sept. 25, 1728, he was sworn in, and became a full member of the Academy. In recognition of his rare genius, and in consideration of his impecunious condition, his entrance fee was reduced to 100 livres. "The Buffet" and a "Kitchen" piece were accepted as "diploma pictures."