The Buffet

Chardin painted kitchen tables when everyone around him was painting gods and aristocrats. A copper pot, a few eggs, a dead hare, a glass of water. The Academy admitted him as a painter of animals and fruit, a lower rank, and he stayed in that category his whole career without seeming much bothered. The paint is the point. He built surfaces from short, dry, granular touches that only resolve at a distance, and contemporaries could not work out how he did it. Diderot wrote about the effect at length and gave up trying to explain it. In the 1730s he shifted to figures, mostly domestic: a governess, a boy building a house of cards, a woman returning from market. Nothing happens in them. The mood is attentive rather than sentimental. Failing eyesight pushed him to pastel late in life, and the self-portraits from those years, spectacles on, cloth tied round his head, are among the most direct things in eighteenth century French art.