Friday, June 2, 2017

Chardin's Derivations

Gerard ter Borch
Seated girl in peasant dress
before 1681
oil on canvas
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Nicolaes Maes
Woman scraping parsnips
1655
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin
Kitchen-maid scraping vegetables
1738
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Nicolaes Maes
Girl peeling apples
ca. 1655
oil on panel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"It has always been realized that Chardin had taken up seventeenth-century Netherlandish genres and modes of depiction.  At the time the Fleming Teniers was much invoked; nowadays the similarities seem closer to post-Rembrandtian Dutch painters like Gerrit Dou, Nicolaes Maes, Gerard ter Borch and Gabriel Metsu.  These men often worked with lighting compositions that involved indistinct backgrounds, for instance.  They are not the same as Chardin's, but they are an element in the problem he was addressing.  But Chardin's relation to Netherlandish painting has been so fully studied and established I would rather point to another area in earlier painting Chardin engaged with, much more than has been acknowledged: the Diderot view of Chardin as the truthful painter of things-as-they-are dies hard."

Nicolaes Maes
Girl at a window
1654
 canvas
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin
Soap-bubbles
ca. 1733-34
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Gerrit Dou
Man smoking a pipe
ca. 1650
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

"The painting of the late Italian Renaissance, as it was to be seen in Paris, is in my view a deep preoccupation of Chardin.  In 1756 his friend the engraver Cochin fils gave a lecture to the Academy of Painters in Paris on light.  Chardin himself was in the audience.  Cochin gave an account of the physics of light and spoke of lighting composition:  in brief, he recommended bright foreground and dimmer background, and the two operational authorities he offered  Veronese and Guido Reni, great eighteenth-century values  are painters who surely much interested Chardin.  Veronese did so in a number of ways: one obvious thing Chardin took from him was the rhetorically posed diagonal figures of his early figure paintings."

Paolo Veronese
Allegory of Marriage
ca. 1570-75
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin
Sealing the Letter
1733
oil on canvas
Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin

Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin
A Lady Taking Tea
1735
oil on canvas
Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow

"A subdued element of this is active even in A Lady Taking Tea.  But it is above all the kind of lighting composition represented by Guido Reni's David that Chardin worked on.  He adapted the heroic late Renaissance formula of brightness and distinctness to his genre and still life pictures.  Chardin's small Cellar Boy is far from Reni's David in many matters, but the lighting has the same underlying arrangment: indistinct background, a left-lit and clearly relieved middle plane, and in the right foreground a local complex of brilliance.  For year after year Chardin made variations on this scheme  often, as with the Cellar Boy, trying an accent of hue rather than lustre in the foreground  and, again, there are subdued elements of it in A Lady Taking Tea.  Chardin was a very history-regarding painter." 

 Michael Baxandall, from Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (Yale University Press, 1985)

Guido Reni
David with the head of Goliath
1606
oil on canvas
Louvre

Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin
Cellar Boy
1738
oil on canvas
Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
Saying Grace
1744
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin
Still-life with partridge and pear
1748
oil on canvas
Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt

Before returning Michael Baxandall to the bookshelf, perhaps we should listen to his grounds (against the general tide of opinion in his day) for challenging the time-honored authority of the great Diderot 

"Diderot wrote many appreciative pages about Chardin, and he also wrote a treatise on perception in the Lockean vein, the Letter on the Blind of 1749.  This again raises a general problem.  The relation between period art criticism and what we are doing at present is in any case complex.  The appearance in art criticism of an idea from an extraneous universe does not necessarily mean it was actively in play in the painter's intention: it does mean it was possible in the period for someone to make the connection  a necessary but not sufficient condition for its use in explanation.  Art criticism is not a pure registration in words of how people saw pictures at any time.  It is often much more a  minor literary genre, clearly with relation to how people saw painting, but affected by generic constraints and suggestions of a quite literary tradition and mode.  At some times the conventional and normative element in art criticism is very oppressive: this was so in the eighteenth century, and quite particularly so in the sub-genre of Salon criticism, in which most of what Diderot and indeed others said about Chardin appeared.  The most penetrating eighteenth-century thoughts about painting often occur not in art criticism proper or even (another problematic area I shall not be working with) aesthetics, but in eccentric materials less confined by the generic demands of art criticism (or aesthetics).  From these, I think one can develop something like an alternative art criticism for the eighteenth century . . ."