Jean Siméon Chardin – Still-Life with Jar of Olives

Jean Siméon Chardin, Still-Life with Jar of Olives, 1760, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris

The still life paintings of Chardin’s mature period take as their subject domestic kitchen objects and comestibles that at first glance may seem humble and prosaic but which in his depiction of them become sacred and eternal. Still Life with Jar of Olives is a superlative example of such meditative achievements. On a stone shelf sits the eponymous glass vessel standing cylindrically tall above its companion objects, cork stoppered at the top and with its brine-steeped contents gleaming invitingly in its lower half. A shallow dish of pears sits in front, stalks uppermost, and a stray apple is forgrounded while on the right an ornately decorated yet unassumingly small Meissen tureen is indicative of a certain status to the household to which it belongs. Its white porcelain and high-glaze finish is singularly lustrous among the earthy hues of the other objects.  On the left there is what has been variously described as either a large pie or a loaf of bread, but which looks to me more like an upended earthenware bowl in front of which stand two glass goblets of red wine, one half full, one almost empty. In front of these, with its stalk hanging over the edge of the shelf, there’s a Seville orange with its lineally creased peel shining waxily and to the left of this a knife and cutting board which also protrude over the edge. Two macarons and what I think might be some cake or a block of pâté (again, scholars seem to differ on this) are also displayed.

The light in the painting is softly diffused, creating shadows beside the apple and beneath the board, shadows which are gentle rather than hard, indicating that its possibly candlelit source is slightly from the above right; the gleam on the wine glasses, the apple and the jar are suggestive of a pantry door just having opened to admit it. What’s more, while it may sound stupidly obvious to comment on the quality of stillness in a still-life painting, this isn’t simply a matter of inaction or inertia; here stillness also betokens a sense of hush, a noiselessness and placidity that imbues this mise-en-scène, as if it had been revealed to us in the course of some reverential communion rite.

There are a few factors which contribute to this worshipful feeling. Firstly, the arrangement of the objects may look casual, but is highly deliberate in its orchestration of verticals and horizontals. There is a profound harmony to this composition which ventures beyond banal symmetry, and which conveys a visually rich consonance between shapes, between the varying textures of hard and soft surfaces, between solid and liquid, between light and darkness, between what is natural and what is man-made, between things perishable and abiding. The viewpoint is from fractionally above so that we can see both the leading-edge rim of the closer wineglass as well as its far one, giving the work subtle perspectival depth and substance. The objects are clustered to the centre of the fame; what might lie to the left or the right beyond the painting’s focus of attention, its imagined home setting, is irrelevant; nothing (no thing) should distract from the sense of devotional raptness focussed on the things before us.

Secondly, the muted umber tones of the scumbled background, depicting what might be a rough plastered wattle-and-daub wall, allows all attention to be focussed on the objects standing in front of it; it provides a neutral distractionless backdrop to them. And yet, it also contributes a sense of immersion. It graduates from a chiaroscuro depth on the right side to relative clarity on the left, with a catch of lambency on a patch above the top of the jar. It is the ethereal quality to the backdrop that lends greater aura to the objects themselves and highlights a formality and sense of order to them too.

I think Chardin brings reverence to what would normally be considered unworthy of artmaking in eighteenth century France. Still-life painting in this period was considered to be a lesser form in the hierarchy of art subject matter, certainly when compared to depictions of notable historical or mythological people and events. While Chardin did paint figures, his work was not concerned with grand classical or religious narratives. Instead, he brings solemnity, dignity and most of all serenity to ordinary, human-scale things as if in celebration of, and gratitude for, them. He bestows stateliness, poise and a sense of exceptionalism on things easily taken for granted and lets us viewers recognise their unassuming beauty too.

In one sense, Chardin’s art anticipated some of the spirit of the French Revolution (Chardin died ten years before the storming of the Bastille) in that it exalted what was commonplace rather than anything aristocratically rococo.  If artists such as Jacques-Louis David went on to bring neoclassical drama to revolutionary and post-revolutionary subjects, eclipsing Chardin for many decades, the simple moral probity and honesty of works such as Olives was ‘re-discovered’ in the second half of the nineteenth-century and again later in the twentieth, in periods when its bombast-free fidelity and integrity once more found appreciative audiences.

Chardin still-lifes bear little of the lavishness of Dutch Golden Age examples of the genre either. Works such as Still Life with a Gilt Cup by Willem Claesz. Heda for instance, painted 125 years before Olives, is astonishing but for very different reasons.

Willem Claeszoon Heda, Still Life with a Gilt Cup (1635), oil on panel, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Painted with a realism that is almost photographic, works like this and others of their period, including Vanitas works, are often rich (even overloaded) in detail and symbolism and master the phenomenon of reflection like none before or since, but by contrast, Chardin’s art seems rooted in the terroir and despite the fact that he lived his entire life in Paris, it speaks of a uniquely French agrarian culture that feels intimate, timeless, and artless in the sense of it seeming authentic, unpretentious and unadorned.

Still-Life with Jar of Olives has a distinctively auratic presence and the objects it depicts perform as if hallowed, not simply thanks to the composition alone but also by virtue of Chardin’s extraordinary brushwork technique, the secrets of which he guarded closely. This painting makes me feel that objects have an immanence that is not normally gifted to most people to perceive but which great artists can sometimes reveal for us.

The critic Michael Fried sees Chardin as pivotal in the history of art, when what he terms theatricality, the painting’s seeming awareness of the beholder and its performance for him or her, was overturned so that art become more self-contained, particularly as far as figure painting is concerned. These kind of theoretical framework arguments are persuasive, but miss, in my view, the actual experience of looking at a work like Olives where what this beholder feels is not the artist’s detachment, but a very real engagement with its creator. Chardin’s paintings may be absorbed in themselves but absorb us in their contemplation too, whether or not this was his conscious intention.