Glass
of Water and Coffee Pot
(oil
on canvas, 1760)
Carnegie
Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Still
Life Painting
Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin was one of greatest
masters of Still Life in the history of art.
The
painting style of the establishment in his day was Rococo:
a pretentious style crammed with allegorical images from
classical mythology swirling with ornate decoration. To
Chardin this theatrical approach reduced art to some kind
of intellectual conversation piece. It was totally alien
to the world that he constructed - a simple world of truth,
humility and calm played out in a few square inches on
the wall.
Chardin
always looks at the world as if he is seeing it for the
first time. The intensity of his vision shows us that
there is beauty in the everyday objects that surround
us - a beauty that we take for granted as we are often
too close to see it. From Chardin we learn that there
is hidden character on the charred surface of an old coffee
pot, or a jewel-like radiance in the crystal clarity of
a glass of water. Like all good art his paintings open
our eyes and teach us to see afresh.
The items he portrayed from his own home were selected
for their shapes, textures and colours, rather than for
any symbolic meaning they may have had. They were simply
painted to convey the visual pleasure he experienced in
looking at them. As his friend, the critic Diderot put
it, “To look at pictures by other artists it seems
that I need to borrow a different pair of eyes. To look
at those of Chardin, I only have to keep the eyes that
nature gave me and make good use of them.”
Chardin's
Painting and Composition Techniques
What
Chardin strove for was an overall effect: a unity of tone,
colour and form. His still lifes reveal themselves slowly,
with his objects gradually emerging from their subtly
toned background, summoned as the writer Marcel Proust
puts it, “out of the everlasting darkness in which
they have been interred.”
Chardin
would prime his canvases with a brownish pigment, sometimes
tinted with red or green. This would give him a neutral
background to paint on. On this he would brush in the
darkest tones, then the mid-tones, and finally the highlights.
When he arrived at the correct tonal balance, he would
add colour, being careful to maintain the overall harmony.
He would finally complete the work by going over it again
with the colours he had already used in order to create
the reflections and highlights that tune and unify the
composition. In the example above, the same white that
is used for the cloves of garlic is echoed in the reflections
from the glass on one side and in the burnished highlights
of the copper coffee pot on the other. The range of browns
across the picture are united by a subtle hint of the
green of the garlic leaves.
Chardin's
'Glass
of Water and Coffee Pot' contains many of the key elements
of his deceptively simple still lifes. His subject matter
is always secondary to his search for the compositional
balance of tone and colour. The subject comprises three
common kitchen items arranged on a concrete shelf: a glass
of water, a charred copper coffee pot and a few cloves
of garlic. It is the harmonies and contrasts that he builds
into the visual elements of these ordinary objects that
make this painting extraordinary.
The
glass and coffee pot are both truncated cones, but the
shape of one is an inversion of the other. The juxtaposition
of these two forms creates a dialogue between their geometric
shapes (mouse over the image to
view). This visual exchange continues through other
elements: the glass is light, transparent, cold, smooth
and reflective, while the coffee pot is dark, opaque,
warm, rough and charred with soot. Even the details of
these objects are carefully balanced as the handle of
the coffee pot and the glass from the water level up,
both occupy the same horizontal strip on the picture plane
(mouse over the image to view).
Chardin
balances the tonal values of the glass and the coffee
pot by creating a counterchange with the background. He
carefully graduates the tone of the background from dark
on the right to light on the left. This results in a contrast
with both objects: the glass looks brighter against its
dark background while the coffee pot looks darker as its
background becomes lighter.
There
is a basic rule of composition that states you should
not have a long unbroken line parallel to the bottom of
the picture, as this creates an area of 'dead space'.
Chardin introduces the garlic and its foliage to break
the long line of the shelf and to enhance the illusion
of space at the front of the picture. They also act as
a compositional device to lead the viewer's eye into the
painting and to link all the objects together. As softer
organic forms, they create a welcome contrast to the hard
geometric shapes of the glass and coffee pot.
Basket
of Wild Strawberries
(oil on canvas, 1761)
Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York
Many
of Chardin's favourite still life objects often reappear
in other compositions. In 'Basket of Wild Strawberries'
he uses the same glass in a very similar arrangement to
'Glass of Water and Coffee Pot'. His purpose in doing
this is to develop some variations of the harmonies and
contrasts of visual elements that he explored in the earlier
painting.
Chardin’s
paintings appeal greatly to modern eyes accustomed to
the simplified forms of Cézanne,
and the Cubists.
They all share the same ideals: a unified composition
reached through the analytical drawing of pure forms,
uncluttered by emotion and without any superfluous detail.
Jean
Baptiste Siméon Chardin Notes
