Hare and Tortoise

By the end of Chardin's first decade of fame, still life had given way to a no less remarkable series of paintings based on the human figure: Initially the artist widened his view to take in isolated servants who might have been hovering in range of the implements and provisions in his still lifes. Children, alone or in pairs, illustrate homilies about learning and dissipation with the same geometric gravity. Finally, he seamlessly joined household and homily in a set of world-defining interiors with bourgeois mothers and children, which struck his contemporaries - from heads of state to the new audience of ordinary viewers found in the public exhibitions of the Salon - with the force of revelation. These small canvases, which might easily be held in the hand, outweighed in attention and respect the grandest historical dramas that hung above them. Here was the model of natural, well-ordered affection and nurturing within the family on which the Enlightenment would found its notion of civil society. And nowhere had it found such convincingly tender yet dispassionate representation (to which the complete absence of male subjects no doubt contributed).

But Chardin himself turned away from this charge almost as quickly as he had happened upon it, leaving his newly large and excited audience to digest his rare painted images in the form of moralizing prints. For the last two decades of his career as a painter, he turned again to the seclusion of still life; the complexity and refinement of these renewed investigations ill his old mode largely leave the powers of description behind. Go look and be amazed.

Thomas Crow is the Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art at Yale University and a contributing editor of Artforum.

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