Kahng examines French painter Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin's pastels. As Diderot commented somewhat acidly, Chardin chose to showcase his illusionistic skills by elevating sculptural models of ...dubious accomplishment. Nevertheless, their feat of illusionism proclaimed the seventy-year-old painter's undimmed "magic." The hagiographical construction of Chardin's identity within the French school parallels the critical reception of the seventeenth-century Dutch artist, whose unorthodox technique and self-invention were thought to have enabled the realization of an inimitable genie, born through, paradoxically, what was construed as a necessary "enslavement" to nature. Similarly, as narrated by Chardin's earliest biographers, the artist's natural genius was only realized when he rejected the learned mannerisms of his teachers and submitted himself to painting only what he saw.
Historically, Jean-Siméon Chardin’s
The Kitchen Maid
and
Return from the Market
have been characterized as austere images of middle-class virtue. However, the engravings made after these paintings ...include verses that place the paintings within the satirical tradition. Thus, there is a misalignment between the canonical interpretation of Chardin’s kitchen maids as virtuous and the satirical understanding of these paintings. I reconcile these two contradictory interpretations by offering a feminist reinterpretation of Chardin’s
The Kitchen Maid
and
Return from the Market
, juxtaposing the prints and their satirical verses and considering the female viewer. In my analysis, I focus on small, disquieting details that seem to be out of place in Chardin’s œuvre, the effect of stopped time within these paintings, and the women’s expressions. From these details, I argue that Chardin’s women are neither the one-dimensional figures of domestic bliss nor the comedic stereotype, but rather women with agency, offering a feminist reinterpretation of these canonical works.
THE COVER Cole, Thomas B
JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association,
08/2011, Volume:
306, Issue:
7
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
One of the most influential still life painters of the 18th century was Jean Simeon Chardin. Here, Cole features An Architect's Table, a painting by Chardin's student, Thomas-Germain-Joseph Duvivier, ...which was JAMA's cover for its August 2011 issue. Accordingly, the painting may have been completed after Chardin's influence on him had begun to wane, because it has even less in common with Chardin's style than Attributes of Sculpture and Architecture. The objects in a still life by Chardin are highlighted as individual forms within an angular composition, but An Architect's Table uses objects as interlocking elements of a compact, unified structure.
In The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Maugham invokes identifiable paintings by Gauguin, anonymously, to build a fictive oeuvre for his anti-hero, the artist Charles Strickland, whose life story is ...roughly patterned on that of Gauguin. In The Moon and Sixpence, Chardin's paintings and Manet's Olympia offer the reader two contrasted moralizing cameos, cultural reference points ancillary to the narrative as such, but rich in art-historical implication, suggesting much of the novel's ethical import. Taken together, the three paintings summarize the moral watershed Blanche Stroeve has crossed.
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Soap bubbles became popular in 17th century paintings and prints primarily as a metaphor for the impermanence and fragility of life. The Dancing Couple _1663_ by the Dutch painter Jan Steen is a good ...example which, among many other symbols, shows a young boy blowing soap bubbles. In the 18th century the French painter Jean-Simeon Chardin used soap bubbles not only as metaphor but also to express a sense of play and wonder. In his most famous painting, Soap Bubbles _1733/ 1734_ a translucent and quavering soap bubble takes center stage. Chardin's contemporary Charles Van Loo painted his Soap Bubbles _1764_ after seeing Chardin's work. In both paintings the soap bubbles have a hint of color and show two bright reflection spots. We discuss the physics involved and explain how keenly the painters have observed the interaction of light and soap bubbles. We show that the two reflection spots on the soap bubbles are images of the light source, one real and one virtual, formed by the curved surface of the bubble. The faint colors are due to thin film interference effects. 2008 American Association of Physics Teachers.
The author explores how Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) uniquely exploited the Salon du Louvre's logic of repetition to emphasize his originality. He contextualizes Chardin's coordination ...and exhibition of his autograph replicas and reproductive prints to argue that he employed them to draw attention to the continued European presence and availability of his works as original repetitions. He also analyzes Chardin's reception to suggest that his exhibition of painted repetitions underscored his unique ability to copy himself and underlined his work's resistance to copying by others. He examines formal properties of prints after Chardin in relation to their reception to posit that these prints were received in terms of their internal visual syntax rather than the absolute formal qualities of his paintings. Ways in which Chardin's practice demonstrates how repetition of artworks and of their documentation and commentary in print media stand at the origin of modern aesthetics are discussed.
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An excerpt from New Life: A Memoir of Pregnancy and Early Motherhood is presented. Among others, Colburn talks about eighteenth-century French painter Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin's life and ...paintings.
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Jean-Siméon Chardin's paintings of dead rabbits and hares are distinctive in the history of the game piece for their use of paint to create a tactile, material surrogate for fur. Emphasizing the ...haptic presence of the animal body, Chardin's vividly brushed pigments also enliven the furry surface as if to counteract the fact of the animal's death. Such attention to the body's materiality, including the subtle, emotional appeal of the vibrant fur, are compared with the radical materialist theories of Julien Offray de La Mettrie, who posited for animals and people alike a material soul inseparable from the body. While European paintings of dead animals had from their origins invoked concerns about the status of the soul in a mechanistic body, Chardin's für suggests, as did the theories of La Mettrie, a sensitive, material "soul" for the animal- and perhaps, by extension, for the human as well.
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