Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (
1699 –
1779) was an 18th-century
French painter. He is considered a master of
still life.He favored simple yet beautifully textured still lifes, sensitively handled domestic interiors and
genre paintings. Simple, even stark, paintings of common household items, are elevated to an iconic idealization through his uncanny ability to capture the effects of light. He was a master of textures, shapes, and composition, and his impeccable drawing skill reflects his thorough understanding of the volumetric occupancy of space. This understanding of the three dimensional matrix allowed him to fill his paintings with the soft diffusion of light which appear to fill the air around the objects he painted. His brush carresses the form almost as if it emulates the light which passes over and reveals. One can feel the delight he had in painting the reflected lights and shiny glints of light which emerge out of the shadow. Largely self-taught, he was greatly influenced by the realism and subject matter of the 17th-century
Dutch and Flemish masters. In 1728, The painting illustrated here, The Ray, gained for him admission to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture.His love of truth and nature endeared him to advanced thinkers in France, the encyclopédistes in Denis Diderot's circle. Detecting a moral value in Chardin that was lacking in Boucher, Diderot became his chief intellectual supporter. "It is the business of art," he argued in 1765, "to touch and to move, and to do this by getting close to nature." Chardin epitomized that ambition at work: "Welcome back, great magician, with your mute compositions! How eloquently they speak to the artist! How much they tell him about the representation of Nature, the science of color and harmony! How freely the air flows around these objects!" "This is unfathomable wizardry. Thick coats of color are laid one on top of another, and their effect transpires from below upwards. At other times one might suppose that a mist had blown over the canvas: or again that a light foam had been thrown over it Draw close and everything becomes blurred, flattens out and disappears: draw away and everything is recreated and reproduced."
Antonie Vollon, (1833-1900) was a gifted and prolific French painter that excelled in landscape, marines and still life painting. Born in Lyon, the young Vollon apprenticed to an engraver and attended the Art school there. Quickly mastering the skill of oil painting, he made the still life his focus as a motif, no doubt influenced by the great 18th century French still life painters, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1777) , Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818), and Jean-Baptiste Oudry ( 1686 – 1755). In 1859 the young painter goes to Paris and finds the artistic mileau which feeds his art spirit, making friends with Phillip Rousseau,( 1816-1887), Eugène Louis Gabriel Isabey (1803 – 1886), Jean-François Millet (1814 – 1875), Augustin Théodule Ribot (1823-1891) and many of the so-called Barbizon painters. Among his friends is Alexandre Dumas, with whom he accompanies to the Normande coast. It is there that he discovers Mers le Bains, a small fishing village on the coast where he makes his studio , marries and lives for the next 20 years. What interested the artist in this rural village was precisely the proximity with the sea, which of course served its interest for the marine landscapes, but especially provided it for the fish still lives. Vollon also painted landscapes of the port of Tréport near Mers-les-Bains, was interested in the fishing vessels and made some portraits of fishermen. Vollon's painting technique is typified by a dark ground, and alluring paint quality, which he created with a swift alla prima technique coupled with translucent varnish mediums. Perhaps influenced by Rembrandt and Velasquez, Vollon and his fellow Barbizon style still life painters, explored this moody and seductive style of painting which would be seen later to exert great influence on the next generation of painters such as William Merrit Chase (1849-1916), Frank Duveneck (1848-1919),and Charles Webster Hawthorne (1872-1930).
