by Will Durant
3. Chardin: 1699–1779
How different from Boucher’s was the world of Chardin—what a contrast in conceptions of beauty, in character and wit! Here was almost a class war, a revolt of the middle-middle class against the wasteful epicureanism of the financiers, the aristocracy, and the court. Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin was born bourgeois, remained contentedly bourgeois, and painted bourgeois life affectionately to the end. His father was a master cabinetmaker, high in his guild, owner of a home in the Rue de Seine on the Left Bank. Because he supposed that Jean would succeed him in his trade, he gave him little schooling, much manual training. Chardin later regretted this scantiness of education, but it kept him from treading again the old tracks in art, and turned his face and brush to the objects around him in the workshop and the home. He liked to draw, and soon itched to paint. The father let him enroll in the studio of Pierre Jacques Cazes, then a painter for the court.
The youth was unhappy there; the classical models he was told to copy seemed absurdly remote from the life he knew. When a surgeon friend of his father asked him to paint a sign proclaiming the barber-surgeon’s trade and displaying its instruments, Jean, perhaps remembering Watteau’s emblem for Gersaint, painted a vast signboard showing a man wounded in a duel, attended by a surgeon and assistant; but for good measure Chardin added a water carrier, a constable, some night watchmen, a carriage, a woman gazing from its window, a crowd of onlookers peering over heads—and all in an éclat of bustle and gestures and excitement. The surgeon was displeased, and proposed to discard the sign, but it won so much attention and approval from passers-by that he let it remain over his door. We hear no more of Chardin till in 1728 his paintings of a fish (La Raie) and a sideboard with silver and fruit (Le Buffet) drew special praise in an open-air exhibition in the Place Dauphine. Some members of the Academy invited him to apply for membership; he arranged to have a few of his paintings displayed there anonymously; they were acclaimed as masterpieces, ascribed to Flemings; he confessed his authorship; he was reproved for the ruse, but was admitted (1728).
In 1731 he became the fiancé of Marguerite Sainctar, whose parents promised a good dowry. During the engagement these parents suffered heavy losses and died, leaving Marguerite penniless; Chardin married her nevertheless. Chardin père gave them rooms on the third floor of a house that he had recently bought at the corner of the Rue du Four and the Rue Princesse. There the artist pitched his studio, which was also his kitchen; for he had now definitely chosen to paint still life and genre. The vegetables, fruit, fish, bread, and meat that littered the room became in turn the models for his brush and the menu of his meals.
Chardin was charmed by the changing shapes and colors of ordinary things. He saw in them qualities of texture and light rarely noticed by incurious eyes. The cheeks of an apple were to him as romantic as a maiden’s blush, and the gleam of a knife on the green of a tablecloth challenged him to catch it in its flight and fix it in his art. He rendered these lowly objects with such fidelity and insight, such mastery of color and contour, light and shade, as few painters have displayed. We look at these natures mortes and perceive that they are alive, that we never saw them properly before, never realized the complexity and uniqueness of their forms, nor the nuances of their tints. Chardin found poetry not only in a vase of flowers or a cluster of grapes, but in an old worn caldron, a nut, an orange rind, a crumbling crust of bread. There had always been poetry in them, as the Flemish and the Dutch had known; but who in the France of Boucher and Pompadour had ever suspected it? The beauty of these objects, of course, was in the eye of the beholder, or rather in his soul; it was Chardin’s intense feeling, as well as his intent vision—and his poverty—that made a lyric of the larder, an epic of a menu.
Everyone knows the story—or legend?—of how he was prodded into painting human forms. One day he heard his friend Aved refuse a commission of four hundred livres to paint a portrait; Chardin, accustomed to small fees, marveled at the refusal; Aved answered, “You think a portrait is as easy to paint as a sausage?”28 It was a cruel jibe, but useful; Chardin had confined his subjects too narrowly, and would soon have satiated his clients with dishes and food. He resolved to paint figures, and discovered in himself a genius of sympathetic portrayal that he had allowed to sleep. Meeting the challenge head on, he painted a portrait of Aved himself as Le Souffleur (The Blower).29 He bettered this with Le Château de Cartes (The House of Cards); but here too the excellence was in the clothing rather than the face. In L’Enfant au Toton (The Child with a Top) Chardin struck his second stride: the hands a bit awkward, but the face revealing a sympathetic understanding. This tender empathy found outlets in his pictures of girls, as in the two masterpieces in the Rothschild Collection: a girl playing badminton, another “amusing herself with her luncheon.”
In women Chardin saw not the rosy lures that had aroused Boucher but the wifely and maternal virtues that made the family the prop and savior of the state. With Chardin the middle-class woman entered French art, and had her due. He knew her and loved her in all her engaging services: bringing food from the market, drawing water, peeling turnips, winding wool, caring for the sick, warning the schoolboy against truancy, or (in the most famous of Chardin’s pictures, Le Bénédicité30) holding up the meal until the youngest daughter, with little hands joined, has murmured grace. He saw woman always in her house dress, without frills, never idle, serving her husband or her children from dawn and the morning prayers till they are all safely tucked in bed. Through Chardin we see a Paris saner than the court, still clinging to the old morality, and to the religious faith that gave it a mystical support. It is the most wholesome art in all of art’s history.
These now universally acclaimed pictures found a very limited market, and brought Chardin just enough francs to maintain him in contented simplicity. He could not haggle with customers; he let his pictures go for almost any offered fee; and as he worked slowly and laboriously, he wore himself out in relative poverty, while Boucher used himself up in affluence. When his first wife died, after only four years of marriage, he let his rooms and affairs fall into a baccalaureate disorder. His friends prevailed upon him to remarry, if only to have a woman’s deft and patient hand restore some order to his ménage. He hesitated for nine years, then took to wife the widow Marguerite Pouget, in literally a marriage of convenience. She brought him a moderate dowry, including a house that she owned at 13 Rue Princesse. He moved into it, and his poverty ended. She was a good woman and a solicitous wife. He learned to love her gratefully.
To further finance him the King gave him (1752) a pension of five hundred livres, and the Academy (1754) appointed him its treasurer. Soon afterward it engaged him to place the pictures submitted to its Salons; he was thoroughly unsuited to this task, but his wife helped him. In 1756 a friendly engraver, Charles Nicolas Cochin II, persuaded Marigny to give Chardin a comfortable apartment in the Louvre. It was this same Cochin who, anxious to draw Chardin away from culinary repetitions, secured for him a commission to paint three dessus-de-porte pictures—to be placed “over the door”—for some rooms in Marigny’s château. Chardin laboriously produced (1765) Attributs des Arts, Attributs des Sciences, and Attributs de la Musique.31 A further commission resulted in two similar tableaux for Pompadour’s palace of Bellevue. Unfortunately the five thousand livres pledged for these five pictures were not paid till 1771.
Meanwhile the aging artist was losing his skill. In 1767 Diderot, who in 1759 had hailed his work as the soul of “nature and truth,” said sadly, “Chardin is an excellent genre painter, but he is passing.”32 La Tour’s pastels were capturing the fancy of Paris. In a burst of rivalry Chardin himself took chalk and paper, and astonished La Tour by turning out two pastel portraits of himself which are among the most arresting and most finished products in the Louvre. One showed him with an old double-knotted coif on his head, spectacles crowning the end of his nose, cravat wound warmly about his neck; the other revealed the same garb, the same face full of wond
er and character, plus a visor to shade his ailing eyes. Still more remarkable was the pastel portrait that he made of his second wife, now sixty-eight years old, a lovely and kindly face, drawn with skill and love. This is the picture that we would choose as the chef-d’oeuvre of Chardin.
It was a triumphant close to a unique and honorable life. We need not picture Chardin as a man immune to human faults; indeed, he too, pierced by the nettles of life and jealousy, could react with touching choler and prickly speech. But when he died (1779) not a soul in the envious, slanderous world of Parisian art and wit could find a hostile word to say of him. Even that decaying regime seemed to realize that Chardin had revealed, with a technique that none surpassed in his time, the France that was the real and still healthy France, that hidden world of simple labor and family loyalty that would survive—and would enable France to survive—a century of chaos and revolution. He was, said Diderot, “the greatest magician that we have had.”33
4. La Tour: 1704–88
The veering vanes of taste today award the palm for eighteenth-century French painting not to Boucher, nor to Chardin, but to Maurice Quentin de La Tour. As a “character” he is the most interesting of the three, for he mingled his vices and virtues with impish insouciance, drove the whole cowering world into a corner, and, like Diogenes, told a king to get out of his way. He was a moneygrubber of consummate rapacity, bumptious, impudent, arrogant; a bitter enemy and incalculable friend, as vain as an old man concealing or boasting his years. He was an honest, straightforward curmudgeon, a lavish philanthropist, a genial boor, a fire-eating patriot, a scorner of titles, refusing a royal offer of nobility. But all this is irrelevant; he was the greatest draftsman of his time, and the greatest pastel painter in the history of France.
Louis XV, sitting to La Tour for a portrait, was piqued by his frequent praise of foreigners. “I thought you were a Frenchman,” said the King. “No, Sire,” answered the artist, “I am a Picard, from Saint-Quentin.”34 He was born there to a prosperous musician, who proposed to make him an engineer. The boy preferred to draw pictures; the father reproved him; Maurice, aged fifteen, fled to Paris, then to Reims, then to Cambrai, painting portraits here and there. At Cambrai an English diplomat invited him to London as his guest. Maurice went, made money and merry, returned to Paris, and posed as an English painter. Rosalba Carriera was in Paris in 1721; her pastel portraits were sought for by every notable from the Regent to the newest nouveau riche. La Tour found that such drawing with colored crayons suited his hectic temperament better than the patient elaboration of oil. Through years of trial and error he learned to achieve with chalk such shades and subtleties of color and expression as no other portraitist of the time could match.
When he exhibited some of his portrayals in the Salon of 1737 the oil painters began to fear this crayon competition. His three pastels were the talk of the Salon of 1740; his portrait of Président de Rieux, in the black robe and red gown of a magistrate, was the triumph of the Salon of 1741; his portrait of the Turkish ambassador was besieged with admiring spectators in 1742. Soon all the fashionable world demanded transfiguration into chalk. La Tour’s encounter with the King became historic. The artist began by objecting to the room chosen, which admitted light from every side. “What do you expect me to do in this lantern?” grumbled La Tour. “I particularly chose this sequestered room,” replied the King, “so that we should not be interrupted.” “I did not know, Sire,” said La Tour, “that you were not the master in your own house.” On another occasion he expressed regret that France had no adequate fleet; the King slyly countered, “And what about Vernet?”—who was painting seascapes crowded with ships.35 When La Tour found the Dauphin misinformed on some affair, La Tour told him blandly, “You see how easily people of your kind allow yourselves to be taken in by swindlers.”36
Despite his distressing candor, the Academy in 1746 admitted him to full membership—which was a certificate of mastery. But in 1749, prodded by the oil painters, it resolved to accept no more works in pastel. In 1753 a painter complained that “M. de La Tour has so developed the art of pastel that he may provoke a distaste for oil painting.”37 La Tour fought back with invectives and chef-d’oeuvres.
He had a rival in pastel; Jean Baptiste Perronneau was preferred by Lemoyne, Oudry, and other Academicians. La Tour asked him to paint a portrait of La Tour; Perronneau complied and produced a masterpiece. La Tour paid him handsomely, but then painted himself in one of the most revealing self-portraits known. He arranged with Chardin to have the two portraits exhibited side by side in the Salon of 1751. Everyone agreed that the autoritratto excelled Perronneau’s portrait. La Tour’s La Tour still smiles in victory in the Louvre.
There, too, is the portrait with which he challenged Boucher—the one pastel that he exhibited in 1755. He almost lost the opportunity. When an invitation came to paint the most famous woman of the reign, he replied, “Kindly inform Madame de Pompadour that I do not go out to paint.” It was his way of luring fortune by retreat. His friends begged him to yield; he sent word that he would come, but on condition that no one should interrupt the sitting. Arriving, he removed his gaiters, unbuckled his shoes, discarded his wig and his collar, covered his head with a taffeta cap, and began to paint. Suddenly the door opened; the King entered. La Tour protested, “You gave me your promise, madame, that your door would remain closed.” The King laughed, and begged him to resume work. La Tour refused. “It is impossible for me to obey your Majesty. I shall return when Madame is alone.… I do not like to be interrupted.” The King withdrew, and La Tour completed the sitting.
Of the two most famous portraits of Pompadour, La Tour’s is pro-founder than Boucher’s; less brilliant in color, less exquisite in finish and detail, but more mature in expression and interpretation. La Tour pictured the Marquise, doubtless at her own suggestion, as the patroness of art, music, letters, and philosophy. On a nearby sofa a guitar; in her hand some sheets of music; on the table a globe, a portfolio of her own engravings, Voltaire’s Henriade, Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois, and Volume IV of Diderot’s Encyclopedic.
When La Tour had finished the portrait he asked for a fee of 48,000 livres. Madame, extravagant though she was, thought this a bit de trop; she sent him 24,000 livres in gold. La Tour proposed to send the money back. Chardin asked him whether he knew the cost of the paintings in Notre-Dame, which included masterpieces by Le Brun and Le Sueur. “No,” La Tour admitted. Chardin calculated their total cost at 12,600 livres. La Tour, readjusting his perspective, accepted the 24,000 livres. In general he charged for his portraits according to the wealth of the sitters; if they objected he sent them away unportrayed. Probably he made exceptions for Voltaire, Rousseau, and d’Alembert, for he warmly admired the philosophes, and frankly avowed his own loss of religious belief.
Perhaps because of his high fees he was in universal demand. Through him we know the leading personalities of the age; he became a pantheon in pastel. He drew lovely portraits of the Queen, of the young Dauphin and the demure Dauphine,38 and of La Camargo, prima ballerina; he managed to make Rousseau look amiable and sane;39 in one of his finest works he pictured Maurice de Saxe, the handsome victor over armies and women;40 he caught the full fire of life in the eyes of his friend the painter Jean Res-tout;41 and he dressed himself in silk and lace and wig for the self-portrait that now hangs in Amiens. Despite his rough manners, his lawless caprices, and his unpredictable moods he was welcomed in aristocratic homes, in M. de La Popelinière’s circle at Passy, in Mme. Geoffrin’s salon. He was on terms of friendship with the leading writers of his time, even with the painters and sculptors who envied his success—Vanloo, Chardin, Greuze, Pigalle, Pajou. The King gave him a superfluous pension, and a lodging in the Louvre. The man must have been lovable after all.
He never married, but he did not scatter his seed as widely as Boucher. He had a mistress, Mlle. Fel, whose singing helped to make the success of Rousseau’s opera Le Devin du village; Grimm sickened with unrequited love
for her, but she gave herself wholeheartedly to La Tour. He remembered her accommodations so gratefully that in his eightieth year he still drank to her memory. Her devotion was one of his consolations when age stiffened his fingers and dulled his eyes. He paid for the hybris of his zenith with the long humiliation of his decline; he outlived his genius, and had to hear critics speak of it as dead.
Nearing eighty, he left his apartment in the Louvre to live in the fresher air of Auteuil; and finally he returned to the city of his birth. St.-Quentin received the prodigal son with salvos of gunfire, ringing of bells, and popular acclaim. In that quiet town he lived four years more, his proud reason fading into a mild and harmless insanity, mumbling a pantheistic philosophy, praying to God and the sun, and dreaming hopefully of revolution. He died a year before its coming, kissing the hands of his servants in his final agony.
CHAPTER X
The Play of the Mind
I. THE WORD INDUSTRY
THE French language had now become the second tongue of every educated European, the accepted medium of international diplomacy. Frederick the Great used it regularly, except to his troops; Gibbon wrote his first book in French, and for a time thought of writing in French his history of declining Rome. In 1784 the Berlin Academy announced a prize competition for an essay explaining the causes of this preeminence, and issued its own publications in French. The chief causes were the political supremacy of France under Louiv XIV, the spread of the French language by French troops in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Spain, the unquestioned superiority of French literature on the Continent (England had reservations), the popularity of Parisian society as the finishing school of the European elite, the desire to replace Latin with a more modern and flexible speech in the commerce of nations, and the purification and standardization of the French language by the French Academy through its Dictionary. Nowhere had any vernacular reached such precision and variety, such point and charm of phrase, such elegance and clarity of style. There were some losses in this victory: French prose sacrificed the simple directness of Montaigne, the rough and hearty vitality of Rabelais; French poetry languished in the prison of Boileau’s rules. The Academy itself, until Duclos aroused it after his election in 1746, had slipped into dreamy formalism and cautious mediocrity.