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Lot Essay
Chardin was admired by many of his contemporaries above all other painters, and critics -- then as now -- acknowledged that his art transcended the quotidian matters it depicted. In contrast with the luxurious tastes of the 18th century, the paintings with which Chardin first made his reputation were small still lifes, such as this and the following lot, depicting the ordinary with startling realism. On a stone ledge in the plainest of kitchen interiors, the artist has arranged everyday household objects with deliberation: some beets, a glazed earthenware pot and a metal skimmer; a spicebox and a crumpled dishrag; a casserole, a copper pot, a mortar and a pestle and some eggs. In these paintings, the simplest of objects emerge from the delicately modulated half-light with poetic monumentality: perfect compositions of timeless, classical equilibrium, are nevertheless charged with emotion. 'Who has expressed, as he has expressed, the life of inanimate objects?' asked Jules and Edmond de Goncourt (1864); Chardin himself declared: 'One uses colors, but one paints with feeling.' The Abbé Le Blanc (1753) recognized that 'there are works which need no label to indicate their master. Such are works by Chardin, the painter who renders nature with the greatest accuracy and truth.' Le Blanc was the first to see in Chardin's art a visual equivalent of philosophy -- 'What M. de Fontenelle has said about a philosopher applies exactly to M. Chardin: He catches nature in the act' -- but almost two centuries later André Gide (1937) could claim that 'the substantial gravity in one of these paintings and the attention lavished on the object are as contemplative as ... a meditation by Descartes.' For Diderot, Chardin was, simply, 'the great magician.'
Although the present paintings may not originally have been conceived as a pair, it is certain that they have been viewed as such since the 18th century, when they were purchased - probably directly from Chardin - by the eminent Swedish collector Count Gustav Adolf Sparre (1746-1794), who, as behove a young nobleman of the time, had been studying in Paris for four years beginning in 1768. Count Sparre who during these years assembled the finest collection of its kind in private hands in Sweden, also bought two genre scenes by Chardin, The Drawing Lesson (Tokyo Fuji Art Museum) and The Right Education (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) which he might have acquired from La Live de Jully's collection in 1770, and from which he is known to have purchased Greuze's Washerwoman (J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu). Count Sparre's celebrated collection of Dutch and Flemish masters probably provided the inspiration for the Royal Gallery arranged by King Gustav III at the Royal Palace in Stockholm in the 1780s. In 1837 the whole collection was bought from Sparre's daughter by Count Carl de Geer, and hung in the de Geer's castle until 1855, when he gave the collection to his granddaughter upon her marriage to Count Axel Fredrik Wachtmeister, owner of Wanas Castle. The Chardins remained at Wanas with the rest of the collection for over 100 years until 1982 when Count Axel Fredrik Wachtmeister's great grandson, the former Swedish Ambassador and Dean of the Diplomatic Corps in Washington, Count Wilhelm Wachtmeister brought them to the United States.
The present lot is signed with initials. Two other versions of the composition are known: one, also signed with initials, is in the Musée de Picardie, Amiens; the other, formerly in the Henry de Rothschild Collection, is in a private collection in Paris. The following lot is signed Chardin and dated 1734. Another version, also signed but not dated and of equally high quality, was acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1980. Georges Wildenstein convincingly dated the present painting to 1732-4, the same period as the following lot. That other versions of each exist and are paired with different compositions perhaps reveals that Chardin, who regularly repeated his most successful compositions, kept a number of these small still lifes in his studio and encouraged collectors to mix and match them to their test.
Although the present paintings may not originally have been conceived as a pair, it is certain that they have been viewed as such since the 18th century, when they were purchased - probably directly from Chardin - by the eminent Swedish collector Count Gustav Adolf Sparre (1746-1794), who, as behove a young nobleman of the time, had been studying in Paris for four years beginning in 1768. Count Sparre who during these years assembled the finest collection of its kind in private hands in Sweden, also bought two genre scenes by Chardin, The Drawing Lesson (Tokyo Fuji Art Museum) and The Right Education (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) which he might have acquired from La Live de Jully's collection in 1770, and from which he is known to have purchased Greuze's Washerwoman (J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu). Count Sparre's celebrated collection of Dutch and Flemish masters probably provided the inspiration for the Royal Gallery arranged by King Gustav III at the Royal Palace in Stockholm in the 1780s. In 1837 the whole collection was bought from Sparre's daughter by Count Carl de Geer, and hung in the de Geer's castle until 1855, when he gave the collection to his granddaughter upon her marriage to Count Axel Fredrik Wachtmeister, owner of Wanas Castle. The Chardins remained at Wanas with the rest of the collection for over 100 years until 1982 when Count Axel Fredrik Wachtmeister's great grandson, the former Swedish Ambassador and Dean of the Diplomatic Corps in Washington, Count Wilhelm Wachtmeister brought them to the United States.
The present lot is signed with initials. Two other versions of the composition are known: one, also signed with initials, is in the Musée de Picardie, Amiens; the other, formerly in the Henry de Rothschild Collection, is in a private collection in Paris. The following lot is signed Chardin and dated 1734. Another version, also signed but not dated and of equally high quality, was acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1980. Georges Wildenstein convincingly dated the present painting to 1732-4, the same period as the following lot. That other versions of each exist and are paired with different compositions perhaps reveals that Chardin, who regularly repeated his most successful compositions, kept a number of these small still lifes in his studio and encouraged collectors to mix and match them to their test.