Stop and Look – The Return from Market by Jean-Simeon Chardin (1738)
Chardin could paint a loaf of bread so that you can feel its crusty texture, imagine biting into the soft crumb of it. He could make his paint crunchy, creamy, silk-smooth, shiny, shimmery, dull; every surface seems to be brought into vivid reality in his pictures.
They may be still lifes pure and simple — at the start of his career he painted many of them, often with dead game — or, from the 1730s, they may show figures surrounded by objects, as in this example. Sometimes the subject is a single figure, a young woman, a scholar, a girl or a boy engaged in a trivial activity (Chardin’s children at play are among the most beguiling in art). The painterly touch is always caressing, rigorously true to the subject depicted.
The son of a Paris cabinet-maker who specialised in making billiard tables, Chardin was brought up to be sensitive to the surfaces of objects. He knew how inanimate things fitted into the business of life, and how people used those things, lived with them and appreciated them.
His sensitive depiction of every detail seems sometimes to overwhelm any meaning the picture may have: he looks at this servant laden down with loaves and a bag of meat as she pauses unselfconsciously to display a graceful turn of her body and head, the brilliant white of her chemise shining beneath a warm grey pinafore.
She is plainly not a glamorous model. Caught in mid-action, she is performing a daily chore. And the more we look at her the more we see that she’s definitely a thinking, feeling individual. The wistful glance behind her alerts us to the other figures in the picture: another servant is standing in a doorway, a young woman talking to a man whom we see only as a half-hidden face.
That wistful glance is a glance of regret, surely: the servant and the man are in a relationship that excludes our laden shopper. Her action of leaning for support on the solid chiffonier is one of weariness and even jealousy. Beneath its insouciant calm, this is a scene of understated emotion – the kind of emotion that ruffles our lives without breaking out into overt passion. Historically, this picture straddles the world of still-life in which Chardin began his career, and the late eighteenth-century vogue for scenes of poignant emotion, of “sentimentality”.
A word that’s often used in describing Chardin’s pictures is “tender”: the objects he paints, from the glistening bottles on the floor to the huge copper water-cistern glimpsed in the next room (a favourite subject, presented as if it was a human character), are drawn with tenderness, and his human characters, adults or children, are seen with the eyes of a fond unjudging parent.
The frivolities of contemporary high fashion, of Boucher’s sensuous nudes, the artificialities of Watteau’s languishing courtiers, are totally absent: this is the ordinary life of eighteenth-century France, brought home to us by the most truthful and sympathetic of reporters.
Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection at Tate Britain and is the author of many works on the artist.