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The Copper Cistern, ca. 1735
Jean-Siméon Chardin (French, 1699–1779)
Oil on wood
Musée du Louvre, Paris
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Chardin
June 27, 2000–September 3, 2000
This major loan exhibition offers a survey of Chardin's distinguished career as a still life and genre painter, as seen in sixty-six works from international collections. The son of a Parisian artisan, Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) was received into the French Academy in 1728. The quality of his naturalistic painting in the 17th-century Dutch tradition was exceptional and his success as a painter of animals, birds, and fruit was immediate. The artist later turned to half-length figures and genre scenes and his interior views, which depict 18th-century bourgeois life, are remarkable for the studied harmony of their pictorial structure. The critic Diderot wrote in 1767, "One pauses instinctively in front of a Chardin like a weary traveler who sits down . . . in a grassy spot that offers silence, water, shade, and a cooling breeze." Among the highlights of the exhibition are The Ray (Musée du Louvre, Paris), Girl with Shuttlecock (private collection), The Governess (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), and Basket of Wild Strawberries (private collection), as well as Soap Bubbles, a painting in the Metropolitan Museum's collection.
The exhibition is made possible by The Florence Gould Foundation.
The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris; the Kunstmuseum and Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf; and the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
An indemnity has been granted by the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.
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