Chardin

A kitchen table holds only ordinary things, but in Chardin’s paintings the people who have just left the room seem almost present. What can a bowl or copper pot reveal that grander subjects cannot?

In eighteenth-century France, official art often looked to Italian models and prized the theatrical, the mythological, the grand. Paul G. Konody follows Chardin, a painter of still lifes and modest domestic scenes, who found his subjects in everyday bourgeois life—and made humble objects glow with color, texture, and human sympathy. Long neglected after his death, Chardin emerges here as a painter rooted in his own people, whose painstaking craft seems to vanish in the finished image. What makes these quiet pictures hold the eye?

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