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A Picture of Chardin's Making

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 34, no. 2 (2001) Pp. 251–274. He’s an ordinary lad, really (fig. 1). Not the sort of begrimed ragamuffin that the brothers Le Nain might have recruited a century before for one of their essays at picturesque poverty, nor a boy formally portrayed with the finery and bearing that in ancien régime France spoke of noble birth. A commoner, then. A commoner, but one who would go far. He—or, more likely, one of his two or three nearly identical clones—put in an appearance at the prestigious Parisian Salon of 1739 held in the royal palace of the Louvre (after which the brood scurried into various private collections).1 Many of his peers, those figuring in the forty-odd genre scenes painted by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin in the years surrounding 1740, fared even better. The lass being prepared for public outing in The Morning Toilet (fig. 2) was spirited out of the Salon of 1741 by the Swedish ambassador Count Carl Gustaf Tessin (the Salon catalogue lists the work as belonging to him) and soon joined court life at the royal palace at Drottningholm. Closer to home, in 1740, Louis XV welcomed, as a gift from the artist himself, the children of Saying Grace (fig. 3) and The Diligent Mother into that alwaysgrowing crowd of dutiful subjects depicted within the paintings of the French royal collections. By now, my opening conceit is showing its strains. Of course, not the children themselves but their painted images enjoyed elevation into social circles well above the apparent rank of the sitters, perhaps even to be revered there. The PICTURE OF CHARDIN’S MAKING