| dc.description.abstract | Among numerous painters in eighteenth century France, Chardin is Undoubtedly an unique figure. There are some contradictions between his status in Academy, his several shifts on the choices of subject matter during his career, the way by which critics at that time assessed his painting and his position in French tradition of painting which is still under construction by art historians. However, it is those contradictions of different contexts mentioned above evoke the initial curiosity of this thesis. Therefore, the main effort of this thesis is try to find out a kind of coherence explainable for the nature of Chardin’s art and to resolve the complicated contradictions just mentioned.
For this reason, this thesis tries to re-evaluate the still life of Chardin by analyzing the art criticisms in eighteenth century. Among those critics, via the discussion of commentators of nineteenth century and art historians of twentieth century, Diderot’s criticisms are adopted as not only the important sources for understanding the art of Chardin but also the materials for constructing his historical position. Thus, this thesis aims to re-interpret Diderot’s criticism in order to re-discover the quality of Chardin’s works and to re-place his art. Meanwhile, by doing so, the main concern of this study is transferred from the direct discussion of Chardin’s painting surface to analyze the specific relationship between the artistic form and the audience. This thesis attempts to investigate in which way Chardin’s art has been accepted and interpreted at his time on one hand, and indicate how the critical language which responds to Chardin’s artistic style has been developed by audience of eighteenth century on the other.
Diderot’s position to Chardin’s art drawing from criticism can be considered in two way: trompe-l’oeil and the technicity of painting. As to the former, because of the influence from empiricism, Diderot legitimatised and raised the status of illusion, which used to be devaluated in the classical theory of Academy, and then developed a new kind of visual experience of looking at his still life. However, this new looking experience corresponds to his discovery of the technicity from Chardin’s works. In this context, Diderot’s viewpoint shifts from art as a natural replica or transparent illusion, to art as representation. During this process, the object of aesthetic activity expands and transfers to the inherent qualities of painting and the manual aspect of artistic practice. Moreover, Diderot also detects the intuitive looking pattern and critical rhetoric appropriate to his experience.
Finally, this study retraces Diderot’s criticism, the quality of Chardin’s painting, the looking pattern which corresponds his criticism back to the French cultural tradition and find out that there are precedents which possess similar qualities and can be regarded as examples opposite to Italian tradition. Therefore, it reveals the relativity of French painting tradition to the other traditions it inherits—the Italian and the Flemish tradition for example. On the spectrum of art history, if the Italian tradition presents those related to discourse, such as reason, mind, spirit and lines etc, then, their oppositions are those excluded from discourse, such as sensation, sense, material and color etc. Since the art of Chardin and Rococo both demonstrate the artistic pattern and looking relationship related to the latter, they belongs to the French tradition which is opposite to Italian tradition. Hence, Chardin inherits the aesthetic qualities of Rococo on one hand, he also takes nature as an object of observation, and translates his visual experience to two-dimensional plane on the other. That’s the reason that Chardin’s art plays a crucial role in the historical development of French painting.
J.B.S Chardin, Denis Diderot, Still life, Art criticism, Salons, Tradition of French painting | en_US |