Chardin: An Intimate Art (Discoveries Series)

The first point to make is that this is a small, soft-back, pocket-sized book, 12.5cm x 17.8cm. Originally published in French in 1999, it appeared a year later in Jane Brenton's English translation of a text by Hélène Prigent and Pierre Rosenberg.The book starts with a revealing chapter, `The Difficulty of Discussing Chardin' which wrestles with the challenge of writing about an artist whose life is known about in broad detail but who said very little about his art, whose few letters deal with administrative or professional issues, and whose contemporary biographer, Charles-Nicholas Cochin, writing a year after the artist's death aged 80 in 1780, found difficulty in revealing the painter and his character.This chapter is followed by `Chardin and his Age' and `Chardin at Work'. These three chapters are illustrated in colour. Whilst each page is small and each reproduction is often very much smaller, their clarity is excellent.The final chapter, `Documents' presents brief texts on `Chardin through the eyes of his contemporaries', `The Salon of 1763', `Chardin and Diderot', `Masters?' which suggests influences on the artist from Old Masters, `The Goncourts: The revelation of Chardin's colour', `The notion of truth in Chardin's work', 'Artists and writers' [who have been inspired by the artist] and `Cézanne and Chardin'. Here the authors have collected independent comments from writers from the artist's day to the present day. Thus under the heading `Artists and writers' there are comments by Proust, 1895, Morandi, 1956, Giacomettti, 1962, Francis Ponge, 1963, Gérard Titus-Carmel, 1994, and Lucien Freud, 1995. The 15 illustrations of this chapter are in black and white.The book ends with a Chronology, brief suggestions for Further Reading, a List of Museums holding works by the artist, a List of Illustrations, an Index of Chardin's Works and a General Index.There are a remarkable number of illustrations for such a small book, upwards of 130. The reproduction on the front cover is a detail from "The House of Cards", 1737, and although it seems impossible there is even a detail [of "Girl Returning from the Market", 1738] on the spine of the jacket.This small book contains an incredible distillation of information by an author, Rosenberg, who served as Director of the Louvre between 1994-2001 and, together with Renaud Temperini, produced an updated catalogue raisonné for the artist in 1999.If ever a quart was poured into an egg cup, then this is it. The Thames & Hudson New Horizons series, of which this is an example, cover great many artists of all periods, Ancient Civilisations, archeology, architecture, diamonds, King Arthur and elephants, as well as vampires, voodoo and volcanoes - an incredible range of topics.I am sure that all this makes commercial sense and this book on Chardin is very impressive, and yet ..... it is small and would easily get damaged.The print is often very small, which is maybe why the famous "Self-portrait", 1771, often referred to as the "Portrait of Chardin with Spectacles", in which he appears without wig or formal clothes, looks out at us from several pages. Other familiar paintings include "The Skate", c. 1725-26, "Dead Hare with Gamebag and Powder Flask", c. 1726-30, "The Buffet", 1728, "The White Tablecloth (The Saveloy)", 1732, "Soap Bubbles", c. 1734, "The Copper Cistern", c. 1734, "The Smokers' Box (Pipes and Tumbler)", c. 1737, "Child with a Spinning Top", 1738, "The Attributes of the Arts and their Rewards", 1766 and "Self-portrait with Eye-shade", 1775.However, as an introduction to a fascinating artist who took ages to complete a painting, partly because of the time he took to position the items in his still lifes, I must give it a 5* star rating and set off to get a larger book on the artist.