Jean Siméon Chardin
(French, Paris 1699 – 1779 Paris)
12. Head of an Old Man, 1771 Pastel on blue paper, laid down on canvas; 17 5/8 x 145/8 in. (44.9 x 37 cm). Signed and dated in brown pastel at lower right: chardin / 1771; at upper right: C 1771 Char. The Horvitz Collection, Boston
easel, this format provided a resilient surface on which to work. As evidenced in their self-portraits, many painters in pastel considered the bare, mounted sheet ready to receive the marks of the crayon the proud symbol of their practice. Textural properties, strength, and color were of great importance in choosing paper for pastel. Throughout the eighteenth century paper was made for the general purposes of printing, writing, or wrapping, but not for artists’ needs. The papers most commonly used for crayon painting, eventually referred to as “wrappers,” were colored, thick, and robust. Most popular with pastelists was blue paper processed from indigo-dyed rags in shades from drab to brilliant, though papers in muted grays, whited browns, buffs, and off-whites were also employed. (Paper in richly saturated hues was not produced until the early nineteenth century.) Although pastels were customarily executed on colored paper, this was rarely because of aesthetic considerations, as the hue was not intended to be visible in the final composition. Unlike the paper left in reserve for the middle tone in chalk drawings, the support of a pastel, like a painting’s canvas, was expected to be obscured by the medium’s opacity and by its coverage across the entire surface. 22
Jean Siméon Chardin, born in Paris in 1699, trained with the history painter Pierre Jacques Cazes (1676 – 1754) and in 1728 was received into the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, presenting two still lifes that were admired by the academicians. One is the famous painting of a ray fish and the other a more traditional canvas representing a buffet (both in the Musée du Louvre, Paris). In the 1730s Chardin began to paint genre scenes, and these he exhibited with success at the Salon when it reopened in 1737. His bourgeois interiors and scenes of children playing were inspired in part by Dutch cabinet pictures (the Metropolitan Museum’s Soap Bubbles of about 1735 is a good example). Chardin was elected treasurer of the Académie in 1755, oversaw the hanging of the Salon exhibitions, and was very much an establishment figure even though he worked in what were then considered to be the least important categories of painting, still life and genre. By 1770 the aging artist could no longer use oils because the lead-based materials the pigments contained were contributing to his increasing blindness. Having taken up the medium for the first time at the age of seventy, he exhibited pastel studies described in the exhibition lists as “expressive heads” at the Salons of 1771, 1773, 1775, 1777, and 1779 (the year of his death). Two, or perhaps three, of those are likely to have been self-portraits, and one may have been a portrait of his second wife, all of which are in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Pastel studies of two children that were on the art market in 2003 are dated 1777 and were exhibited the same year. Another of an old woman in a black veil copied from a painting by or after Rembrandt is dated 1776; it belongs to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besançon. This lifesize Head of an Old Man from the Horvitz Collection, Boston, is signed and dated 1771 and was probably exhibited that year. It is Chardin’s earliest known work in what was for him a new medium. The critics received Chardin’s contributions to the 1771 Salon with high praise, finding in them the technical assurance, boldness, and truth to nature for which the old artist was famous. Although at first glance the palette is neutral, close observation reveals a subtle and varied coloration. Chardin endowed his contemplative model with monumentality, sobriety, and wisdom. This work bears comparison with a number of study heads in pastel that Benedetto Luti painted in Rome some fifty years earlier.