French painter of still life and genre, in which fields he was one of the greatest masters of all time. He was the contemporary of Boucher and he taught Fragonard, but his work is a contrast to theirs in every way, representing the naturalistic tendency which persisted through the 18th cent. alongside the more fashionable Rococo. He was received into the Académie in 1728 on the strength of a still life [The Rayfish, Louvre, Paris], which drew forth the extravagant praises of Diderot for its realism, and he was Treasurer of the AcadÚmie for twenty years. His small canvases depicting modest scenes and objects from the everyday life of the middle classes to which he belonged were in the tradition of the Dutch cabinet pictures, which were having a great commercial success in France at the time. Chardin, however, developed a technique of his own, achieving great depth of tone by successive applications of the loaded brush and a subtle use of scrumbled colour. He was praised for his verisimilitude of detail, but his work goes far beyond matter-of-fact realism and through its simplicity and directness of vision achieves a sense of deep seriousness, in spite of the humble objects he portrayed [Pipe and Jug, Louvre]. His genre paintings, which usually contain only one or two figures, are likewise completely without sentimentality or affectation [The Young Governess, versions in the National Galleries of London and Washington]. In his last years, when his sight was failing, turned his hand to pastel portraits and in the 1775 Salon exhibited two self-portraits and a portrait of his wife [Louvre].
He was well known during his lifetime through engravings of his works, which the historian Mariette remarked were selling better than high-flown allegories in the manner of Lebrun, noting this as a significant shift in public taste. In the present century admiration for his work has increased on account of the abstract strength of his compositions, and contemporary painters of many schools, from Cubist to Abstract Expressionist, have drawn inspiration from him.
[Chilvers, Ian, Harold Osborne, and Dennis Farr, eds. Oxford Dictionary Of Art. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.]
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