Jean Siméon Chardin et la peinture des idées britanniques

Abstract

Jean-Siméon Chardin in his still lifes displays a technical mastery and conjures up a kind of representative magic which critics and art-lovers have never ceased to admire. This article proposes to envisage the painter's technique as the outcome of a certain set of epistemological ideas belonging to the current named sensualism, as a sort of application of the new philosophical vision of the world defended by John Locke and his followers. Chardin was no thinker but he received influences from the prevailing ideas of his time which inclined him, together with a painter's practise inherited from centuries of experimenting on the perception of colour and form, to apply to the representation of the real and atomistic rendering which is opposed to the former minutely mimetic approach of the XVIIth century. By his highly epistemological technique, the French master brought together in a unique way and for a short-lived period the philosophy of the enlightenment and the craftsman's experience of painting. This peculiar trait makes him appear as the painter of the British vision of the world