Edmond Pilon has published a comprehensive little monograph in the series Les Maitres de L’Art.  M. Pilon is as sympathetic as he is just in his critical estimates of the man and his work.  There is not much to relate of the quotidian life of the artist.  His was not a romantic or a graceful figure among his contemporaries, the pastellist La Tour, Fragonard, and the rest, nor had his personality a jot of the mysterious melancholy of Watteau.  His artistic ancestry was Dutch; in the footsteps of De Hooch, the younger Teniers, Vermeer, Terburg, Kalf, he trod, rather plodded, producing miracles of light, colour, finish.  A long patience his career, he never indulged in brilliancy for the mere sake of brilliancy; nevertheless he was an amazing virtuoso of the brush.  He was born in the Rue de Seine, Paris, November 2,1699.  His father, Jean Chardin, a joiner, was a man of artistic instinct whose furniture and marquetrie were admired and in demand.  The lad began his tuition under Cazes, but soon went to the atelier of Coypel.  Later he worked under the eye of Carle Vanloo in the restoration of the large gallery at Fontainebleau.  His painting of a barber-chirurgeon’s sign drew upon him the notice of several artists of influence and he became a member of the Academy of St. Luc.  When he exhibited for the first time in public, in the Place Dauphine, 1728, Watteau had been dead seven years; Coypel, Allegrain, Vanloo, Troy, and the imitators of the pompous art of Le Brun were the vogue.  Colour had become a conventional abstraction; design, of the most artificial sort, the prime requisite for a sounding reputation.  The unobtrusive art of Chardin, who went to nature not to books for his inspiration, was not appreciated.  He was considered a belated Dutchman, though his superior knowledge of values ought to have proved him something else.  Diderot, alone among the critics of his epoch, saluted him in company with the great Buffon as a man whom nature had taken into her confidence.

In 1728 he was received at the Academy as painter of fruit and flowers.  He married his first wife, Marguerite Saintan, in 1731, and his son, J.B.  Chardin, was born the same year.  In 1735 he lost his wife and infant daughter, and the double blow drove him into retirement, but he exposed his pictures from time to time.  He was made counsellor of the Academy in 1743, and in 1744 married the second time, a widow, Francoise Marguerite Pouget by name.  This was a happy marriage; Madame Chardin, a sensible, good-tempered bourgeoise, regulated the household accounts, and brought order and peace into the life of the lonely artist.  Hereafter he painted without interruptions.  He received from the king a pension of five hundred francs, his son obtained the prix de Rome for a meritorious canvas, and if he had had his father’s stable temperament he would have ended an admirable artist.  But he was reckless, and died at Venice in a mysterious manner, drowned in a canal, whether by murder or suicide no one knew.  Chardin never recovered his spirits after this shock.  The king offered him lodging in the gallery of the Louvre (Logement No. 12).  This was accepted, as much as he disliked leaving his comfortable little house in the Rue Princesse.  As he aged he suffered from various ailments and his eyes began to give him trouble; then it was he took up pastels.  December 6, 1779, he died, his wife surviving him until 1791.