Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin is an 18th-century French painter, master of still life and genre painting whose sober and contemplative art opposes Rococo frivolity and anticipates modern realism. Coming from the Parisian petty bourgeoisie, he develops a style characterized by meticulous observation of reality, thick and vibrant touch and a palette of browns, grays and ochers that reveals the dignity of humble objects and domestic scenes. His still lifes of kitchen utensils, fruits and game elevate the minor genre to the rank of great painting through their material density and meditative depth that make each ordinary object a subject of contemplation. His bourgeois interior scenes, representing servants, children and mothers, celebrate the domestic and moral virtues of the middle class with a silent empathy that announces social realism. Admired by Diderot as painter of truth against Rococo artifice, he influences Cézanne and modernism through his construction of form through color and his revelation of beauty in the ordinary.