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| Gerard ter Borch Seated girl in peasant dress before 1681 oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Nicolaes Maes Woman scraping parsnips 1655 oil on panel National Gallery, London |
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| Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin Kitchen-maid scraping vegetables 1738 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| 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."
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| Nicolaes Maes Girl at a window 1654 canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin Soap-bubbles ca. 1733-34 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| 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."
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| Paolo Veronese Allegory of Marriage ca. 1570-75 oil on canvas National Gallery, London |
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| Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin Sealing the Letter 1733 oil on canvas Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin |
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| 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)
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| Guido Reni David with the head of Goliath 1606 oil on canvas Louvre |
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| Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin Cellar Boy 1738 oil on canvas Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow |
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| Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin Saying Grace 1744 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| 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 . . ."