Jean Siméon Chardin

JEAN SIMÉON CHARDIN (1699-1779), THE CUT MELON, OIL ON CANVAS, OVAL, SIGNED AND DATED
One of the signal masterpieces of Chardin’s late career, The Cut Melon has for almost two centuries belonged to just two families, the Marcille and the Rothschild dynasties, each of which gathered through succeeding generations the greatest and most celebrated collections of Chardin’s paintings ever assembled. Acquired with its former pendant, The Jar of Apricots (The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto), by François-Martial Marcille (1790-1856) sometime between 1816 and 1836, the pair of pictures passed by descent after François’s death to his son, Camille Marcille (1816-1875), before appearing in Camille’s estate sale in 1876 – remembered as one of the most spectacular auctions of 19 th -century Paris. The paintings were acquired at that sale on behalf of Baroness Nathaniel, Charlotte de Rothschild (1825-1899), with both pictures passing by descent through members of the family until 1951, when The Jar of Apricots was sold by Baron James de Rothschild; the present painting remains in the Rothschild family to the present day, its provenance uninterrupted since its creation. Still in a nearly perfect state of preservation, its fame in France in the second half of the 19 th century was instrumental in the rehabilitation of Chardin’s reputation, some years before the splendid ensemble of paintings by the artist in the La Caze collection entered the Louvre and made his art widely available to a general public. Exceptionally large in size, monumental in design, elegantly poised yet dynamic in composition, richly colored and executed in dazzling layers of powdery glazing, striking in its mellow and enveloping qualities of light and atmosphere, The Cut Melon displays every facet of Chardin’s virtuoso genius in the final and most accomplished phase of his creative maturity.
Born in Paris in November 1699 to a master cabinetmaker who specialized in billiard tables, Jean-Siméon Chardin studied with the history painters Pierre-Jacques Cazes (1676-1754) and Noël-Nicolas Coypel (1690-1734). He aspired to become a history painter himself and was received as a master painter in 1724 in the Académie de Saint-Luc, the venerable Paris guild that was the principal, if less revered, rival of the Académie Royale. His earliest known works, likely dating from this moment, were ambitious if somewhat clumsy multi-figural genre scenes that functioned as signboards – one for a doctor’s surgery (lost): another, The Game of Billiards (Musée Carnavalet, Paris), which may have served to advertise his own father’s business. Insufficiently trained and awkward in his mastery of figure drawing, Chardin saw little chance of success as a history painter and turned instead to still life, quickly making a name for himself with his depictions of dead game – hares, rabbits, ducks and pheasants – and small, spare kitchen scenes with a glass of wine, a bottle, or a silver goblet, and fruit – plums, Seville oranges, apricots and peaches. A rare opportunity to display his paintings to the public offered itself with the Exposition de la Jeunesse held at the Place Dauphine, an annual open-air exhibition to which he contributed a dozen paintings in 1728. Among these was The Ray-Fish (1728; Louvre), which attracted wide and favorable attention. Fewer than four months later, and certainly owing to his success at the Exposition, Chardin was simultaneously approved and received on the same day (25 September 1728) into the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, submitting his Ray-Fish and The Buffet (1728; Louvre) as reception pieces. Despite his lack of academic training, Chardin entered the Académie as a painter ‘skilled in animals and fruit’ and flourished in this category, with little expansion of his repertory for the next five years.
Having established himself as one of the leading still-life painters in France by the early 1730s, Chardin seems to have taken stock of his position and concluded that extending the range of his subject matter might also enlarge the market for his work. Early ambitions now bolstered by a decade of practical experience, Chardin again took up figure painting around 1733, encouraged by friends such as the portrait painter Jacques-André-Joseph Aved (1702-1766), who had chided Chardin that painting the human figure was considerably more challenging than ‘painting cakes and sausages’. Chardin’s devoted friend, the draftsman and printmaker Charles-Nicolas Cochin (1715-1790), recounted Aved’s friendly rebuke, adding that Chardin was “offended by this, but controlled himself and gave no sign of his feelings. The next day, however, he began a figural painting of a maidservant drawing water from a water urn.”
Although Chardin probably never completely abandoned still-life painting, from around 1733 or 1734 until the end of the 1740s, he turned his attentions almost entirely to painting domestic genre scenes. Only two still lifes are known from these 15 years and his contributions to the annual Salons in this period – an excellent measure of his production, as he exhibited at almost every Salon from 1737 until 1779, the year of his death – include 46 genre scenes and no still lifes. His genre scenes usually center around one or two figures – a washerwoman, kitchen maid, mother or governess with her charge, child playing games – and include many of the artist’s most acclaimed and beloved works: The Water Urn (Salon of 1737; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), The Young Draftsman and its pendant, The Embroiderer (Salon of 1738; both, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), The Governess and The Return from the Market (Salon of 1739; both, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), The Schoolmistress (Salon of 1740; National Gallery, London), Saying Grace (Salon of 1740; Louvre, Paris) and The Bird-Song Organ (Salon of 1751; Louvre, Paris), among others. Most of these compositions were reproduced and popularized in engravings and exist in other autograph versions, often in several nearly exact replicas from Chardin’s hand. Chardin was often cited by contemporaries as working very slowly and methodically. When he eventually arrived at a final composition that satisfied him, he was happy to repeat it for patrons eager to acquire his work. This was especially true with his genre scenes, but not uncommon even with his still lifes of the 1730s: A Leg of Mutton (dated 1730) in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux, for example, exists in four other fine versions.
In much the way he had turned away from still life to figure painting in the later 1730s and 1740s, Chardin returned to painting still life in the 1750s and 1760s, when he largely gave up painting the domestic scenes that had brought him such acclaim in the Salons. The reasons for this shift back to the subject matter that first brought him fame is unknown. Middle-aged, recipient of several royal pensions, and financially secure following a second marriage to a wealthy widow, Chardin devoted more of his time and attention to his increased duties at the Académie, which elected him Treasurer in 1755 and put him in charge of hanging and installing the annual Salons. Inventing original genre compositions seems to have been a more laborious undertaking for Chardin than the creation of still lifes, despite the exceptional care he invested in his meticulous arrangements of fruit, foods and tableware. In the last few Salons in which he exhibited genre scenes, they were either older works that he showed once again or repetitions (with small variations) of compositions he had invented a decade or two earlier. Meanwhile, he exhibited ever larger numbers of still life paintings annually – four in 1757, seven in 1759, and at least that many in 1761.