The invisibility of perfection
Anita Brookner
CHARDIN by Philip Conisbee
Phaidon, £37.50
The Paris exhibition of 1979 established Chardin as one of those rare painters about whom no one expresses serious disagree- ment: a restrained, even a severe artist of consummate technical achievement whose subject matter is easy to understand and appreciate, and who confers on the mate- rials and preoccupations of daily life a dignity which his Dutch predecessors in this manner only occasionally treated with- out mixed motives. Moral painting, or the painting of homilies, is ultimately religious in origin; it has the dubious appeal of a sermon from a slightly unbalanced cleric, with its accent on cracked mirrors, broken eggs, spilt wine, and houses of cards, all similies for the vanity, or even the danger, of human wishes, and in many instances a gratuitous burden laid upon the spectator who is automatically perceived as being 01 need of instruction.
Chardin's beautiful pictures — of child- ren playing or learning to say grace, of maidservants and governesses, of ladies taking tea or students drawing — may or may not have had a similar didactic pur- pose. He may or may not have absorbed this mode through an early study of the Dutch little masters, for this was almost a fashion among his contemporaries. Attempts have been made in recent years to turn him into an artist of complicated preoccupations and pre-emptive purpose, but this is a fashion which has overtaken most of the 18th-century painters, and maY be traced to a desire to conceptualise their disarming simplicity, or, more probably, to render the presence of the art historian indispensable. Chardin resists textual analysis. Even Diderot, his contemporary and most ar- dent admirer, found little to say about him and may have suffered frustration on that account. Those supreme aesthetes, the brothers Goncourt, entered voluptuously into a catalogue of textures and sensations, and, like Diderot, enjoyed many vicarious meals of peaches and grapes, the gamey quality of their prose exactly matching the surrogate sensations of taste and touch that so excited them. Yet their desire to render Chardin palpable is ultimately as dis appointing as Diderot's dispirited and mys- tified conclusion that Chardin is 'a magi- cian'. It is significant that the power of words has little to add to the images of Chardin: the painter is complete in himself and perhaps can only be fully understood and admired by other painters.
For the task performed in these paint- ings is almost invisible because it is the task Perfected. To an image that attracts and beguiles is added a style of the very greatest distinction, a distinction all the more impressive in that it would seem to be lavished on subject matter that one is used to seeing treated in the attention-getting manner of the Dutch masters. In place of the self-conscious highlights, the whimsical expressions, and the tours de force of perspective familiar from the works of Terborch and Metsu and De Hooch, Char- din proposes a technique of such undemon- strative virtuosity that we take passages describing water in a half-filled glass almost for granted, or note the synthesising of new colours — a muted Saxe blue, a light orange, a white taken down several registers from brilliance — as if this were somehow inevitable. We may be aware that light is being absorbed rather than reflected from these surfaces; we cannot fail to note the enormous sophistication of those few elements in a still life — but these impressions will be latent. Mostly we shall be conscious of the fact that these images are innocent of any sly hint or lewd thought, and although the repertory of soap bubbles and spinning tops may have been used for a purpose, that purpose is free of moral intention, and the element of malice usually present in the painting of emblems has been done away with. What remains is the act of contemplation which the painter manages to impose on the spectator by the rigorous balance of his Compositions, their careful grounding in a low horizontal, their shallow neutral back- grounds, and the position of the subject at the front of the picture plane. In this way the spectator is judiciously served by the painter who reserves his strongest effects and his most subtle amalgamations for those who repay his works with the long scrutiny for which they are designed. Chardin's life is unspectacular. He was born in Paris in 1699, and lived there, in the Saint-Germain district, all his life. One Journey is recorded, to Fontainbleau, and two marriages. The first marriage was humble and respectable, the second more comfortable and bourgeois. The artistic reflection of this may be seen in the gradual ennoblement of the objects in his still fifes and the change from rabbits and cooking pots to melons, pomegranites, and Meissen bowls. He was a respected officer of the Academie, and from the 1750s was in charge of hanging the Salon exhibitions. Everyone spoke well of him, and his absolute integrity won him wide respect. He began as a painter of still lifer, a genre to which he returned when his career had reached its maturity, but it was as a figure painter that he imposed himself on the public of the day. He proposed an alternative reading of human affairs, di- vorced from the rhetoric, the literary, historical, or mythological associations with which experts were supposed to de- cipher subject matter, and this alternative reading was greeted with delight and relief by the Salon visitor. At the same time, he introduced a seriousness which was nearly always absent from more ambitious scenar- ios, many of which depended on borrowed and obtrusive hints and attitudes which removed them from the spectator's humble wish to understand. He absorbed much • from painters whose reputation was grea- ter in his own day than it is now, such as Largilliere, Oudry, and Aved, and his influence extended to Greuze, Lepicie, Roland de la Porte, and many others. His major followers, however, fall into the trap of compounding their work with a desire to please, or at least to persuade the spectator into an attitude of complicity or sympathy. Chardin is innocent of such persuasion. The 'morality' of Chardin's paintings does indeed reside in this neutrality of attitude, just as, in the final analysis, the influence of other painters and traditions, scrupulously registered by Philip Conisbee in this fine and beautifully illustrated book, is absorbed and rendered inactive. This must be a result of Chardin's very strong and apparently inscrutable personality: any purely illustrative or didactic function is furnished by those coy verses that were printed below engravings after his works. In his own day Chardin stood out as a superior painter for purely painterly reasons. The verdict of our own day has not substantially changed. Philip Conisbee gives an admirably straightforward account of this artist who declined to enter into contemporary debates on the nature and function of painting. His one known dic- tum, and it is a famous one, was, 'Si on se sert de couleurs, on peint avec le sentiment.' It was in the rehabilitation of 'le sentiment' — feeling, rather than sentiment — that he dignified his period. For the rest, he was, and remains, accessible to all.
Chardin's 'Vase of Flowers', courtesy of the National Gallery, Edinburgh
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