Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) became the greatest still life painter of the eighteenth century and a master of the Rococo period. Born in Paris, the son of a cabinetmaker, he rarely left the city his entire life. He apprenticed with the history painter Pierre-Jacques Cazes, then studied seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, especially the vanitas still lifes of Pieter Claesz. In 1728, at age twenty-eight, he was received into the Académie Royale as "a painter skilled in animals and fruits."

Chardin's simple scenes of copper pots, bread loaves, glasses of water, and kitchen utensils glow with quiet dignity. His technique was unique: a granular impasto that catches light in ways that give objects an inner radiance. Where his contemporaries favored grand history paintings, Chardin found the profound in the ordinary. By the 1730s he had expanded into genre scenes of domestic life, painting governesses, children blowing bubbles, and women sealing letters.

Chardin served the Académie for fifty years and by 1770 had become Premier peintre du roi with the Academy's highest pension. In 1757 Louis XV granted him a studio in the Louvre itself. When his eyesight failed in the 1770s, he turned to pastels. Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne studied his work closely, and Henri Matisse copied four of his paintings as a student. Major works are held at the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.