It is very quiet in the room. The boy leans over the table, holding a card in his left hand. The operation is most delicate. His right arm, bent at the elbow, provides a solid fulcrum for his body; his left rests more lightly on the green baize, so that the card, when he will finally set it down, just so, on the fragile structure already erected, will not cause it instantly to collapse.
He is not tense, nor does he slouch. His head is held high, his neck firm, the black tricorne, fitting snugly on his head, shuts out whatever is above him. His large eyes, rather hooded, look down on the precarious structure before him.
Everything is still. The small drawer of the table is slightly open, jutting out towards us, but the boy is as unaware of this as he is of everything except his immediate task. Soon he will have placed the card he is holding on the fragile construction before him, and then either the whole edifice will collapse and he will have to start again from scratch, or, this step achieved, he will be ready to take up another card from the small pile in front of him and see what he can do with that.
At the moment, though, he has no thought for what is to come, his entire being is concentrated on the card he holds so lightly.
Four paintings by Jean-Baptiste Chardin.
8. (right) The Young Draughtsman, 1737. (Musée de Louvre. Photo © RMN)
9. (below) Child with Spinning Top, 1738. (Musée de Louvre. Photo © RMN)
10. (facing page, top) Soap Bubbles, 1738? (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Wentworth Fund, 1949)
11. (facing page, below) The House of Cards, 1736–7. (National Gallery, London)
Now we are in another room. This time the boy has no hat but a fine wig fastened at the back with an elegant black ribbon. (Or perhaps it is another boy, slightly younger, perkier?) Instead of leaning on the table from the left and presenting us his right profile, he stands to the right of the table and we see him in three-quarters profile. The table too is smaller, and rather more crowded, with an inkwell in which rests a splendid feather quill, two books, a rolled-up parchment. These have been pushed to one side to make way for the top which the boy has clearly only just spun, though his hands now rest demurely on the table and his eyes watch the little top as though it had nothing to do with him. Empowered by the spin, the top has come quite close to the edge of the table and now hovers over another open drawer, though this one seems rather full. Striped red and green wallpaper at the back reinforces the sense of verticality imparted to the scene by the boy's upright stance and the fine quill, the dark inkstand and the top, which at present is just a little off the vertical.
In a moment it will fall over onto its side and come to a convulsive stop. But just now it is still spinning, almost still in its centripetal movement. No wonder the boy is gazing at it with such delight, a half-smile on his childish lips imparting to his face a freshness and naturalness quite at odds with the formal, elegant coat and shirt, the fine waistcoat with its prominent buttons, the powdered wig. But the hands tell us that this is a deft and agile child, not an overdressed mother's boy.
Now we are in a third room. Another boy, slightly older than the other two, equally elegantly dressed, the black tricorne on his head, but a long tress of hair hanging down his back this time, tied at the neck with a fine bow, leans on a simple table from left to right. His left elbow takes his weight and in his left hand he holds a pencil which he is sharpening with the knife held in his barely visible right hand. Covering most of the table is a large portfolio, tied by a ribbon, the ends of which hang over the edge of the table. He too is engaged on a task which, though requiring concentration, is mechanical enough to allow him to dream as he performs it, and his hooded eyes look down at his hands as though at a mystery at which he is content simply to be present.
12. Jean-Baptiste Chardin, Glass of Water and Coffee-pot, 1761. (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Howard A. Noble Collection, 66.12)
And now we move out into the open. A young man leans over a stone parapet. Leafy branches surround him. A glass, four-fifths full of a milky liquid and with what might be a spoon sticking out of it, stands on the parapet beside him. He leans far over, anchored by his left arm which is bent at the elbow, and resting his right arm on his left wrist. With the tips of the fingers of his right hand he holds a straw, one end of which is in his mouth. He is blowing bubbles, and a huge bubble has in fact just formed at the end of the straw, on a level with the parapet which is visible through the transparent film of the giant bubble.
His coat appears to be torn at the right shoulder, and his long hair, caught up at the back, has escaped at the sides, giving him something of the appearance of an orthodox Jew. To his left, a little surprisingly, a face is visible, topped by a curious twisted hat and cut off at the mouth by the parapet. Though the eyes of this figure appear to be staring straight at us, it is in fact at the bubble, which floats between him and us, that he is gazing. However, he is too much in shadow for us to be able to make this out with certainty. The eyes of the youth are lowered over his straw.
What these young men and boys are doing is in no way significant or important. They are not figures from Greek or Roman mythology, nor are they biblical or historical characters. There is nothing about them we need to know, for there is, in a sense, nothing about them that is worth knowing. The young man with the pen is probably a draughtsman, but what we see him engaged on is merely preparatory to the exercise of his profession. As for the other three, they seem merely to be passing the time.
Passing the time, but not only that, the scholars tell us: they are positively wasting time. These, we are told, are vanitas images, showing the ways in which idle youths waste their time; or rather, the ways in which Idle Youth Wastes Its Time. But the absurdity of this suggestion, which has been current since his day, is so blatant that it merely highlights the fact that there is something peculiarly resistant to interpretation in these paintings of Chardin, so simple and so quiet, so wondrously beautiful. A gap opens up between our immediate, physical response to them and the ability of the intellect to provide explanations for them: Why these boys? Why doing these things? What is Chardin trying to tell us?
Proust, who did not write about these works but did sketch out a little essay on Chardin's still lifes which he never completed, is, as one might expect from someone who knew how to look and could think about what he saw and then express it powerfully and elegantly, closer to the mark. He suggests that the still lifes, those beautifully painted arrays of pots and jugs and simple kitchen shelves, give us the feeling of the quotidian, not in the sense that they are ordinary but in the sense that they are felt to be in daily use. The very way the paint is put on conveys to us not only the constant use to which the depicted objects are put but also the loving care with which they are made. The worn roughness of their surface, so different from the high polish of most contemporary still lifes painted in order to demonstrate the status and wealth of their owners, conveys at once the quality of such craftsmanship and the wear and tear they have endured in years of household use. And this becomes the central feature of the painting itself, as though Chardin's own work on it was akin both to that of the craftsman who made the utensils and of the maidservant who uses them day in day out as she goes about her work.
Proust, who knew all about the iterative mode, all about the skill required of the novelist if he is to convey the sense of the regularity of days which pass by, each essentially the same, rather than the exciting plot development which is the staple of the common novelist, could well appreciate what Chardin was up to. At the same time he could bring out what Chardin's contemporaries and later commentators have found so disturbing about his canvases: the complete absence of narrative. One has only to compare these still lifes with those of other artists (Morandi is of course the great exception, the one painter who seems to have taken Chardin's lesson to heart) to see that while they are all trying to make a point, either about their own skill or about the way we live or should live, he is concerned only with the reciprocal gifts he and those pots and pans bestow upon each other: they, through the fact of their use and continuity in the ordinary and the mundane, give him the strength to do his own ordinary and repetitious work, while he, through the power of his vision and the skill of his hand, is able to celebrate them for what they are.
It is as though Chardin were telling us that everything is in danger of turning into an anecdote or a lesson, and therefore in danger of ceasing to be itself. It requires a positive effort to take a stand against the steady erosion of mundane reality, an effort all the more problematic in that there seems to be nothing that underpins it and lends it authority. For the authority has to come from the work itself – the work of the hand and the finished work of art. It takes a very special kind of artist to do what Chardin does here.
In the four paintings in which figures appear the refusal to tell a story is even more striking because it seems to go so much against the grain of figurative art. But the point of catching these youths in such intense yet unguarded moments is that for once in the art of the West our viewing time and the time within the painting coincide: we stand there, entranced, and we know that as we turn away the hand will come forward, the card will be put down, the top will fall over, the bubble will burst. But so long as we look, time is suspended, everything waits. Or rather, time is gathered up and everything stands in a state of dynamic repose, concentration and relaxation together.
‘It is said that he has a technique all his own’, Diderot wrote about Chardin, ‘and that he uses his thumb as much as his brush. I don't know if this is true; what is certain is that I have never known anyone who has seen him at work.’
No one may have seen Chardin at work, but all his paintings tell us how he worked: slowly, patiently, modestly, intensely, taking pride in his craft but with no very exalted notion about the status of the work of art or of his own position in any hierarchy. Skill is secondary, he is said to have remarked, what is important is empathy with the subject. History-painting did not interest him. Nor mythology. His work is at once disturbing and exhilarating because he shows us that there is no mystery about art, but that it takes a lifetime to master it; no mystery about life, but that it needs to be lived, not endured. His work, like that of Morandi, recalls us to art and to ourselves. As Ponge, another artist who, like Proust, knew something about the strangeness of the ordinary, put it:
When the ancient mythologies are no longer meaningful, felix culpa, we begin to experience the humdrum reality in a religious mode. I think we will be more and more grateful to those artists who, by their silence, by their simple abstention from the themes imposed by contemporary ideologies, have shown their solidarity with the non-artists of their day [auront fait preuve … d'une bonne communion avec les non-artistes de leur temps].
And he adds, lest we miss what there is of the awesome in Chardin:
Chardin maintains a laudable balance between the tranquil and the fateful. For my part, the fateful is all the more obvious in that it advances at a leisurely pace, without showy outbursts, taken for granted. This is ‘sanity’. This is our beauty. When everything comes together naturally, in a pre-ordained lightning. [Le fatal, quant à moi, m'est d'autant plus sensible qu'il va d'un pas égal, sans éclats démonstratifs, va de soi. Voilà donc la ‘santé’. Voilà notre beauté. Quand tout se réordonne, sans endi-manchement, dans un éclairage de destin.]
Those quiet rooms. Those strange, still youths. They are unimaginable and unimagined – till he painted them. Here too vision and skill go hand in hand. We can talk of Chardin's extraordinary colour sense, of the brilliance of his modulation, of the cunning way he realises space, of the evenness with which he paints the faces of his protagonists, the tables, knives, glasses of water, cards and green baize; we can note the skill with which the snail-shell spiral is made to run from the tip of the tricorne down through the body and out from the pen, the card, the quill. But, as Chardin said, this skill is secondary and what is important is the empathy with the subject. Something is happening that is both trivial, infinitely repeatable, and momentous, unique, unrepeatable. This bubble, once it has burst, will never exist again; this particular house of cards, once it has collapsed, will be gone for ever; this particular trajectory of the top, once the top has fallen over, will never be repeated; this particular pencil will never be as long (and the boy sharpening it will never be as young) again.
The eyes look down and outward, at the hand which is sharpening the pencil or laying down the card, at the spinning top or bubble which has just been released; but the gaze is, somehow, emanating from the whole body, just as it is the whole body which is focused on the act of sharpening the pencil, spinning the top, building the house of cards. That is what is meant by absorption. And our gaze too, as it moves from the hooded eyes to the hand holding the card, the pencil, the straw, falls under the same spell. We too are in that quiet room, not thinking anything, not doing anything purposive, anything that ‘needs doing’. This is order. This is freedom. The hand releases the card as we release the painting that is before us, as Oedipus at Colonus released its protagonist, accepting that we must let it go and yet, for a moment, holding it within the orbit of our attention.