“Skat”, Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin – description of the painting
Description of the picture:
Scat – Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin. 1728. Oil on canvas, 100 fifteen x 100 40 6 cm
Canvases by Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin are distinguished by a special aesthetics. Coming from the lower classes (from a family of hereditary carpenters), the painter had his own awareness of beauty. The sublime plots of mythology or literature were alien to him – Charden wholeheartedly loved still lifes, which at that time were attributed to “low” genres as opposed to portraits and historical scenes. Masters admired ordinary things surrounding objects. Moreover, even the most unsightly things he came out somehow smoothed, if not perfectly. A perfect example of this is the picture “Scat”, which Chardin presented in the central square in Paris in one thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight years as part of the exhibition of Youth.
Charden “unfolded” a still life – before him horizontal placement was typical only for paintings of the “high genre”. With this usual trick, Jean Baptiste hints to his own viewer that a still life may relate to elite art.
A wide table with various kitchen utensils, a cat sneaking up to fish and, oh, a nightmare, a gutted slope that hangs on the wall … A pile of objects looks careless and ordinary, but it is a painstakingly thought out and verified composition. A flat image of the parts emphasizes the naturalness and ease of the plot. The spectrum of the picture is focused on the green polytre and enriched with subtle color transitions.
Naturalness and the latter realism are discouraged at first (all the more so since the painting was created first in the 18th century), but when you look closely, you find that this naturalism is ennobled, smoothed out. Outstanding spectators of Chardin (Proust, Cezanne, Didro) presented a stingray with a wide open belly with such epithets as “terrible monster”, “vile thing”, “strange creature”, but at the same time they unanimously admired the canvas and noted a narrow line separating the ugliness from beauty. Chardin sang the last."