Saylor.org ARTH207: "Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin: Rococo with Restraint"

This lecture is entitled Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin, Rococo with Restraint. So today, we're gonna be taking a look at Chardin, who you see a self-portrait of here on the left side of your screen. And Chardin was another important artist working in 18th century France, and he was working in a more naturalistic trend during the period, a more naturalistic approach to his subject matter, and that, of course, is in relation to the Rococo decadence and sumptuousness and over-the-top style, which we looked at recently. So he's a little bit of a contrast to that. And he's famous for domestic scenes, like you see right here, as well as for still lifes. And he was considered really successful at injecting a kind of beauty and gravity into these seemingly ordinary, everyday scenes. And once again, I said he lacks that over-the-top sumptuousness of the Rococo, and we'll see that in just a minute by taking a look at a comparison. But you should keep in mind that he does show some of the same stylistic affinities with the Rococo, some of the same interest in delicacy and softness in color and light and brushstrokes. So now let's take a look at a comparison between Chardin and a famous Rococo painter. So here we have a work by Chardin, and I'll write the name of it here for you. It's Lady Taking Tea, and it dates to 1735. And I have it compared to this image on the right here, which hopefully should be familiar to you. This is Boucher's Toilet of Venus from 1751. So hopefully you see these two and immediately can see that Chardin is interested in some different things than Boucher was. Remember, this is the Toilet of Venus, the goddess of love in this very sumptuous, erotic setting. Now, how does Chardin depart from that? Well, first off, okay, we have that subject matter. We have Boucher on the right showing us the goddess of love, and Chardin is showing us a woman alone in a private setting just the way Boucher does, but she's in an ordinary setting. She looks like an ordinary woman. She's having her tea, which is a fairly ordinary thing that someone might be able to relate to, whereas most women I don't think would be able to relate to the goddess of love in this fantastical setting. And it really is that setting that tells us so much. Venus over here is just on a virtual bed of soft, sumptuous, seemingly endless fabrics. She's flanked by these fabrics. She's on top of different fabrics, and there's this ornate, elaborate piece of furniture underneath all of those fabrics, and then behind her there's this kind of fantastical, imaginary outdoor setting, whereas Chardin has placed his woman in what's clearly a room, a domestic interior. And even the style, the things he's chosen to depict in this room creates a different feeling. We have more subdued color palette. We have hard surfaces, straight lines, whereas virtually everything in Boucher's painting is curvilinear and soft and plush. So real difference created there. But there is some similarity in the delicacy of the brushwork, the colorism, the soft light, but certainly very radically different subject matter. And also interesting to point out that when we look at Chardin's woman over here, we kind of get a sense of this dignified woman in her home. We could even imagine, you know, she's a good woman. We can sort of put that sort of moralizing quality into this painting. She seems like a good, decent woman, whereas we don't know much about Venus over here, Venus in the guise of this decadent woman, but she certainly is very sexualized and eroticized, and that's a very different feeling from this very dignified, good woman having a private moment at home. Indeed, Chardin's Lady Taking Tea seems to have more in common with the domestic scenes that were so popular in Dutch Baroque painting. And over here, hopefully this is familiar to you, this is Vermeer's The Milkmaid. And certainly what we're looking at, the subject matter is much more similar here than the comparison we just looked at with The Toilet of Venus. So it's similar in that this shows, both of these show a woman alone in a believable, fairly common interior space, you know, having a private moment, and they both have that sense of dignity and respect, and there's a sense of intimacy here. You know, we're looking in on this private moment. You know, nothing scandalous is happening in this private moment, but nonetheless, we're being let in to view this private, ordinary experience. The main difference between these two is the style. Vermeer's Milkmaid is this robust woman, and she's in this very crisp, clear light, and there's lots of bold colors, whereas Chardin's woman, again, in the tradition of 18th century France and the Rococo, she's a little bit more delicate. The colors are a little bit softer. The light is a little bit softer. So while the tone might be more similar to the Dutch Baroque, there is, again, that connection to 18th century France and the Rococo when it comes down to style. Finally today, I just wanted to take a quick look at A Still Life, A Still Life by Chardin, and this dates to 1750. And again, I think it's useful to compare this to other still lifes from roughly the same period and a little bit before, and over here on the right is one we've taken a look at. This is Hedda's Still Life from 1634. So this is from the Dutch Baroque. So Chardin was just as famous for his still life paintings as he was for his domestic interiors, and he does a very similar thing with his approach to still life painting, and that is he takes very ordinary things in vaguely humble settings and infuses them with a kind of seriousness and grandeur that's somewhat unexpected. So it's interesting, again, to compare this to Hedda's 1634 Still Life from the Dutch Republic. I think you can see right away the objects here are not quite as sumptuous and expensive, not as nice necessarily as the objects depicted on the right here. And there's a difference in style too. There's more crispness and clarity, more attention to texture in Hedda's Still Life. One thing that is similar between these two is the way they're arranged on this tabletop, very plain background in these earth tones, and really just one object with a pop of color in the center. But what I think is a really interesting difference between these two is that Hedda has created a sort of drama in his still life. We have broken glass and objects that have fallen over that kind of creates a sort of drama. And none of that is going on in Chardin's Still Life. And really the grandeur and the nobility and seriousness of these really ordinary objects is only there because of the attention he pays to these objects and the way they are so frankly put out there for us, the viewer. There's no other story out there. It's just the objects for themselves, which is a bit of a different approach than we see on the right in the Dutch Baroque example. So to conclude, I just wanted to point out that Chardin's work really reveals a break from the extravagance of the Rococo as we saw, but it also reveals stylistic affinities with that style. So it breaks from it while also continuing some of these stylistic details forward. And you can see that also in this still life, this softness and delicacy. But hopefully this lecture has also shown you that there is a bit of a connection and a holdover even from the Baroque period. So everything you've learned before 18th century France still has some relevance as we move forward.