Chardin’s Portraits & Absorption.
Watteau was an example of the “surprise invader” type. So too was Chardin who initially produced still life and figurative pictures, most of which weren’t destined for a public, but a group of informed insiders, aristocrats and fellow artists. Chardin produced a disciplined type of northern genre with images of people in kitchens, children and young men reading or painted, occasionally conveyed with a muted visual trickery such as opened drawers offered to the viewer. Was it portraiture? Certain images of people, like his self-portraits are images of people that existed, though again there is the problem of how accurate this is a true representation of the living. There also exist paintings where the name of the sitter isn’t mentioned, but it is assumed to a person known to Chardin; a good example of this is the “Woman with a Teapot” who is thought to be Chardin’s wife who sadly died a few months after the picture was done.1 Apart from these self-portraits where Chardin is looking directly at the viewer, most of the figurative pictures have an air of isolation, self-involvement, a general distance from the spectator. For example the wonderful picture of a boy playing cards (London, above) is an image of absorption which does not rely on a beholder of the picture to acknowledge the event taking place.2
1The “Lady taking Tea” was acquired by the famous anatomist Sir William Hunter in 1765 about the time Hunter sat for his own portrait, “My Highest Pleasures” William Hunter’s Art Collection (ed) Peter Black, (Paul Holberton, 2007), 15. Hunter also owned a few other Chardin’s: a pair of pictures of servants working.
2Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 46-51.
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