In this placid interior scene, a wealthy woman swathed in drapery and topped by a white headdress turns to her right as she rotates the handle of a bird-organ—a device invented to teach melodies to birds. She is checking on her pupil in the cage: the barely visible form of a yellow canary perched inside. This appears to have been a royal commission, ordered by the first painter to the king, Charles-Antoine Coypel, for his sovereign, Louis XV. The king appears to have given it as a gift to the brother of his mistress, Madame du Pompadour.
In the background, the artist has included what seems to be an homage to Coypel and another leading artist of the time: the image hanging framed on the wall behind the lady has been identified as an engraving by Bernard Lépicié, Secretary of the French Academy, after a painting by Coypel entitled Painting Ejecting Thalia. Whatever the political ambitions of the painting, Chardin’s soft light streaming in through the window evokes seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings like those by Vermeer.
Lady with a Bird-Organ
It is curious that the artist’s first royal commission — in 1751 — should also have been his last figural composition. In fact, Chardin would afterward paint nothing but still lifes or an occasional portrait, not even completing the companion picture to the Lady with a Bird-Organ that had been ordered for Louis XV. In the Frick canvas, which may well be a replica Chardin made in 1753 of the original painting delivered to the King two years earlier and now in the Louvre, the artist has depicted a middle-class lady — perhaps his second wife — training a caged canary to sing by playing an eighteenth-century precursor of the phonograph known as a bird-organ. The title of the picture when exhibited at the Salon of 1751 — A Lady Varying Her Amusements — refers to the subject’s having put aside her embroidery to play with the bird.
As the final example of Chardin’s depictions of figures in interiors, the Lady with a Bird-Organ contrasts markedly with his earlier images of robust servants whose simple forms dominate their picture space. Different too are the porcelain-like finish of this picture (albeit abraded) and its muted, silvery coloration. One might almost assume that the artist felt obliged to be on his best behavior in presenting his work to his monarch, but these qualities are actually deliberate echoes of seventeenth-century Dutch masters then much in vogue.
Source: Art in The Frick Collection: Paintings, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
Louis XV. Marquis de Marigny et de Ménars. His sale, March, 1782, Paris, Lot 29, sold for 631 livres to de Tolozan. Richard de Ledan. His sale, December 3–18, 1816, Paris, Lot 41, sold to Didot. Baron D. Vivant-Denon. His sale, May 1, 1826, Paris, Lot 144, as Portrait présumé celui de Mme. Geoffrin, sold for 600 francs to Constantin. Comte de Houdetot. His sale, December 12–14, 1859, Paris, Lot 19, sold for 4,510 francs to Meffre. Duc de Morny. His sale, May 31–June 3, 1865, Paris, Lot 93, sold for 7,100 francs to Gabriel du Tillet. Wildenstein. Frick, 1926.
Source: Paintings in The Frick Collection: French, Italian and Spanish. Volume II. New York: The Frick Collection, 1968.
