Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin

(French, 1699–1779)

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin was an important 18th-century French painter known for his modestly scaled still-life paintings. In Chardin’s luminous works, each object is cast within an atmospheric harmony that transcends their materiality. “The beauty of its vast and delicate structure, tinted with red blood, blue nerves, and white muscles, is like the nave of a polychromatic cathedral,” Marcel Proust once wrote of the artist’s painting The Ray (c. 1726). Born on November 2, 1699 in Paris, France, he studied with history painters as a youth, before becoming a teacher at the Académie de Saint-Luc in 1724. The artist’s slowly built up surfaces and meditative gaze was out of the place in a time period dominated by the flowery style of Rococo painting. Chardin’s developed his technique through studying the works of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painters, especially the vanitas still lifes of Pieter Claesz. During the course of his career, the artist made just over 200 paintings and maintained small yet loyal following. He died on December 6, 1779 in Paris, France. Chardin’s paintings were a major influence on a number of later French artists, including Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the National Gallery in London, among others.