Painters of still lifes ranked low within the French Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In the rigid hierarchy of the academy, they were well below painters of monumental history paintings, with their lofty subjects; below portraitists and landscape painters; below painters of genre scenes. Enter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, who was accepted into the academy in 1728 as a painter of animals and still lifes.
In Still Life with Plums, the artist approaches his simple collection of plums, squash, a bottle and glass, with gravity, a respect for the objects’ forms, reflections, and the spaces between them. His contemporaries marveled at Chardin’s so-called “magic,” his ability to convey the tactility of his subjects in strokes of paint. With a stroke of his brush, he inscribed, or rather carved, his name into the worn wood, at right, almost lost in shadow.
Still Life with Plums
The only still life in The Frick Collection is a classic example painted by an undisputed master of the genre, probably quite early in his career. Shunning the lavish and complex productions of his Dutch and Flemish predecessors, Chardin simplified the number and type of ingredients in his still lifes, then arranged these familiar household objects in compositions of an architectonic order. The Claude Lorrain painting, The Sermon on the Mount, is one of the largest paintings in the Collection, while Chardin’s Still Life is one of the smaller canvases. Nevertheless, Chardin’s assemblage of plums, squash, and domestic containers seems almost as monumental and solid as Claude’s mountain. It was the illusionistic realism of such pictures that the artist's contemporaries marveled at, and that led Diderot to speak of their “magic.” It was to Diderot that Chardin revealed the source of his prodigious tactile sense, saying it was by touch and not by sight that he judged, say, the roundness of pine kernels (or here, of plums), rolling them gently between his thumb and forefinger. Modern eyes appreciate too the rich, creamy surfaces of his paintings, which seem to breathe and have a life of their own.
Source: Art in The Frick Collection: Paintings, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
Pillet, Paris. Léon Michel-Lévy, Paris. His sale, June 17-18, 1925, Paris, Lot 126, sold for 220,000 francs to Wildenstein. D. David-Weill, Paris; Wildenstein (1937). Frick, 1945.
Source: Paintings in The Frick Collection: French, Italian and Spanish. Volume II. New York: The Frick Collection, 1968.
