Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin: 11 works

'Ah, Chardin, what you grind on your palette is not this color or that, red, black, or white, but the very substance of things. Jean-Siméon Chardin impressed critic Denis Diderot with his unique style and impeccable technique, which he applied to what was then considered a lowly genre, the still life.'

'The centrepiece of the composition is a plaster cast of the head of Mercury by the sculptor Pigalle, a friend of Chardin's.'

'In his treatment of the other objects, among them peaches, celery stalks, blackberries and figs, Chardin skilfully varied his technique, alternating between lively brushwork and chalky mark-making, glazes and impasto, tonal chiaroscuro and pronounced highlights.'

'Duncan Phillips ranked Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin's A Bowl of Plums among his outstanding oil paintings, calling it "personal and poetic in spite of its apparent objectivity."'

'Although Chardin gives the illusion he has caught two youths in an unsuspected moment, he has rigorously constructed his composition.'

'Although small in size, Young Student Drawing was one of Chardin's most famous works. The fact that he returned to the composition repeatedly over a twenty-year period, painting no fewer than twelve versions, indicates the popularity of the subject and its importance to him.'

'It illustrates beautifully his characteristic clarity and restraint.'

'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.'

'"It is the air and light you take with the tip of your brush and fix to your canvas...(your work) exists between nature and art," wrote Denis Diderot of Jean-Siméon Chardin in his Salon review of 1765.'

'Though considered too modest to be ranked alongside the extravagant works of François Boucher, Chardin's paintings charmed many of his contemporaries. The great Paris intellectual Denis Diderot praised Chardin for his truthfulness and unassuming poetry--the very qualities that captivate us today.'

'Over a century after its creation, the French novelist Marcel Proust said of Jean-Siméon Chardin's audacious self-portrait, "This old oddity is so intelligent, so crazy ...'