Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin

French art in the early 18th century focused on the lavish grandeur that was defined by the King, the elite aristocracy, and the upper class. Works of art were commissioned by these upper class people to display their wealth and power. In turn, this type of lifestyle and patronage created works of art that portrayed the rich upper class and their artificial, frivolous lifestyles and ideals. Art seldom had moral or educational content to it and mostly portrayed ideas of a powerful ruler/king or the romanticized life of the upper class. Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin transformed these ideals in art by focusing on the simple, modest bourgeois class as his subject matter for his genre paintings. These paintings intended to educate and instruct his audience. Philosophers and intellectual circles of this time began to write about principles of human reason and the political and social order informed by ideals of freedom and equality for all, jumpstarting what is now known as the Enlightenment. Chardin’s genre paintings instructed …show more content…
He briefly studied under two history painters, Pierre-Jacques Cazes and Noël-Nicolas Coypel, although, it could be said that he was more self-taught than anything in his specialties of still life and genre painting. In 1728, Chardin presented ‘The Ray’ and “The Buffet’ to the Academy and was accepted as “a painter of animals and fruits” in the lowest category for painters in the Academy. Although Chardin’s still life’s were greatly praised for their incredible naturalness, Chardin resolved to focus on genre paintings after his colleague Joseph Aved made a remark to him asking, “You reckon that this portraiture s a s easy as painting langues fourrees and saveloys?”(Rosenburg,71). According to the tale, Chardin began working on a figure composition the very next day, marking the beginning of his endeavors in genre

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