DOI Heft:
Nr. 342 (November 1925)
DOI Artikel:Breuning, Margaret: Chardin the unfashionable
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.19986#0133
mceRnACionAL
"STILL-LIFE" I763 Inlhe Louvre BY CHARDIN
6HARDIN the UNFASHIONABLE
y| signboard swinging In an age which produced day gave scant heed to him.
2^ above the shop of a pretty pictures for the court Indeed, how could it? For
barber-surgeon at Chardin Created Works Of ^ such a day a man who
Pans in the early years 01 , r , , 1 • painted carrots and onions
the eighteenth century is art from cabbages and jugs was far remoyed from the
not a bad point of departure McLuqOX'Gt BREUNING acclaimed artists, who cov-
for the story of the life and ered canvases with airy
work of the artist who painted it, Jean Baptiste loves and graces, and frou-frous of lace.
Simeon Chardin. Nor is this signboard creaking In this aristocratic eighteenth century—before
away over a narrow, dark street important because the deluge had yet swept away class distinctions
it is the first independent commission of a young and privileges—art belonged to the king and his
painter, but rather because it indicates, as surely court and its subjects must be suited to polite
as proverbial straws the direction of the wind, sensibilities. Yet here is a bourgeois painter who
much of the temperament and character of the portrays the humble utensils of a workman's
man who made it. For Chardin, ignoring all the home, paints the contents of his larder scattered
explicit orders of his patron to represent the imple- about on a table or spends his entire esthetic
ments of his trade, painted a group carrying a equipment on the representation of a steaming
man wounded in a street brawl to a surgeon, thus cauldron or a bowl of eggs. Small wonder his
revealing that peculiar gift which characterizes fame does not spread far or fast among the
all his work of finding in the homely things of courtiers, perpetual revelers in fetes galantes,
everyday life subjects most suited to his genius, striving with jaded sensibilities and feigned enthu-
Yet never did a gift promise less to its pos- siasms to forget reality in a stale atmosphere of
sessor. Never did a man belong less to his age artificiality.
and more completely to himself than did this Yet if these elegant ladies and gentlemen had
same Chardin. Posterity now acclaims him as looked either long or earnestly at Chardin's can-
one of the great colorists of all time, but his own vases with their bits of homely wares—jugs and
NOVEMBER I 9 2 5
one thirty-three
"STILL-LIFE" I763 Inlhe Louvre BY CHARDIN
6HARDIN the UNFASHIONABLE
y| signboard swinging In an age which produced day gave scant heed to him.
2^ above the shop of a pretty pictures for the court Indeed, how could it? For
barber-surgeon at Chardin Created Works Of ^ such a day a man who
Pans in the early years 01 , r , , 1 • painted carrots and onions
the eighteenth century is art from cabbages and jugs was far remoyed from the
not a bad point of departure McLuqOX'Gt BREUNING acclaimed artists, who cov-
for the story of the life and ered canvases with airy
work of the artist who painted it, Jean Baptiste loves and graces, and frou-frous of lace.
Simeon Chardin. Nor is this signboard creaking In this aristocratic eighteenth century—before
away over a narrow, dark street important because the deluge had yet swept away class distinctions
it is the first independent commission of a young and privileges—art belonged to the king and his
painter, but rather because it indicates, as surely court and its subjects must be suited to polite
as proverbial straws the direction of the wind, sensibilities. Yet here is a bourgeois painter who
much of the temperament and character of the portrays the humble utensils of a workman's
man who made it. For Chardin, ignoring all the home, paints the contents of his larder scattered
explicit orders of his patron to represent the imple- about on a table or spends his entire esthetic
ments of his trade, painted a group carrying a equipment on the representation of a steaming
man wounded in a street brawl to a surgeon, thus cauldron or a bowl of eggs. Small wonder his
revealing that peculiar gift which characterizes fame does not spread far or fast among the
all his work of finding in the homely things of courtiers, perpetual revelers in fetes galantes,
everyday life subjects most suited to his genius, striving with jaded sensibilities and feigned enthu-
Yet never did a gift promise less to its pos- siasms to forget reality in a stale atmosphere of
sessor. Never did a man belong less to his age artificiality.
and more completely to himself than did this Yet if these elegant ladies and gentlemen had
same Chardin. Posterity now acclaims him as looked either long or earnestly at Chardin's can-
one of the great colorists of all time, but his own vases with their bits of homely wares—jugs and
NOVEMBER I 9 2 5
one thirty-three