June 27 through September 3, 2000
Special Exhibitions Galleries, Second Floor
Chardin — a major loan exhibition of more than 65 works that will survey the great 18th-century artist's distinguished career as a still-life and genre painter — will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from June 27 through September 3, 2000.
The son of a Parisian artisan, Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) was received into the French Academy in 1728. For the 18th-century academy, history painting was most esteemed, followed by portraiture, landscape, genre, and still life. Nevertheless, the quality of Chardin's naturalistic painting in the 17th-century Dutch tradition was exceptional and his success as a painter of animals, birds, fish, and fruit was immediate. The critic Denis Diderot wrote in 1763 that a still life by Chardin "is nature itself; the objects free themselves from the canvas and are deceptively true to life." Chardin has continued to be greatly admired, inspiring many 19th-century artists, such as Manet and Cézanne.
The exhibition is made possible by The Florence Gould Foundation.
The exhibition was 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.
Among the highlights of the exhibition will be Chardin's early academy piece, The Ray (Musée du Louvre, Paris), which depicts with startling naturalism a gutted ray-fish preyed upon by a bristling cat. The artist later turned to half-length figures and genre scenes that dignify 18th-century bourgeois life. In these paintings, Chardin ennobles domestic tasks — capturing the admonitory role of a parent, the naiveté of a child, the quiet moments that offer pockets of clarity in a turbulent world. With its industrious subject, The Washerwoman (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) conveys moral propriety and, with its depiction of a soap bubble, alludes to the transience of human life. Yet this work — like most in Chardin's oeuvre — is perhaps most remarkable for the studied harmony of its pictorial structure.
Other highlights of the exhibition will include Girl with a Shuttlecock (private collection), The Governess (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), and Basket of Wild Strawberries (private collection), as well as the Metropolitan's own version of the artist's celebrated Soap Bubbles. The exhibition closes with a selection of Chardin's late still lifes, in which he combines bright light with delicate colors and finds balance in the seemingly haphazard natural order of things seen. In these works of consummate simplicity, the artist captures the bloom of flowers and the ripeness of fruit, reflections on a silver surface, and the evanescence of light refracted through water.
Chardin will be accompanied by a catalogue published in French, German, and English editions.
Prior to the Metropolitan's presentation, the exhibition will be shown at the Grand Palais, Paris (September 7 through November 22, 1999); the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (December 5, 1999 through February 20, 2000); and the Royal Academy of Arts, London (March 9 through May 28, 2000).
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November 10, 1999
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