Lady with a Bird-Organ

It is curious that the artist’s first royal commission — in 1751 — should also have been his last figural composition. In fact, Chardin would afterward paint nothing but still lifes or an occasional portrait, not even completing the companion picture to the Lady with a Bird-Organ that had been ordered for Louis XV. In the Frick canvas, which may well be a replica Chardin made in 1753 of the original painting delivered to the King two years earlier and now in the Louvre, the artist has depicted a middle-class lady — perhaps his second wife — training a caged canary to sing by playing an eighteenth-century precursor of the phonograph known as a bird-organ. The title of the picture when exhibited at the Salon of 1751 — A Lady Varying Her Amusements — refers to the subject’s having put aside her embroidery to play with the bird.

As the final example of Chardin’s depictions of figures in interiors, the Lady with a Bird-Organ contrasts markedly with his earlier images of robust servants whose simple forms dominate their picture space. Different too are the porcelain-like finish of this picture (albeit abraded) and its muted, silvery coloration. One might almost assume that the artist felt obliged to be on his best behavior in presenting his work to his monarch, but these qualities are actually deliberate echoes of seventeenth-century Dutch masters then much in vogue.

Source: Art in The Frick Collection: Paintings, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.