Jean-Siméon CHARDIN (Paris 1699 - 1779) Portrait... Lot 48

Jean-Siméon CHARDIN (Paris 1699 - 1779) Portrait of a child in medallion Panel, in tondo diameter : 10,5 cm Old restorations Our painting is a fragment cut out of a larger composition. Children attentive to their work can be found in several genre scenes by Chardin (fig. 1): La Blanchisseuse, ca. 1733-1735, in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm; Le Tour de cartes, ca. 1734-1735, in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin; La Petite Maîtresse d'école, ca. 1735-1737, of which there are several versions, one of which is in the National Gallery in London; Le Bénédicité, ca. 1740 (again, there are several known replicas, two of which are in the Louvre in Paris); or La Mère laborieuse, ca. 1740, of which a version is also in the Louvre. One could also compare the boy's face in The Schoolmistress (London, National Gallery) or, on a larger scale, the profile with the detached nose, the triangular lips, and the reddened cheeks of a similar spirit that characterize The Young Draughtsman (Paris, Louvre) or the young woman in The Convalescent's Food (Washington, National Gallery of Art), around 1740. In all these paintings, the eyes are similarly constructed, with a brown comma on a white spot for the rather small eyeball, which gives vivacity and tenderness to the models. Of course, it is the range of colors that is decisive in recognizing Chardin's hand, this delicate chord of pastel tones around the feather and the white collar, with triangular folds, barely broken, here variations of blue, pale, Prussian, blue-gray (for example, The Governess, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 1738), and also his unique way of laying down small blurred touches, which allow the image to reconstitute itself at mid-distance. Exactly the same play of bluish variations and around white spots can be found in the famous Carnation Bouquet, a masterpiece in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. The headdress with a feather can be seen in the child behind the window parapet to the right of the three versions of Soap Bubbles from the mid-1730s (fig. 2, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Museum of Art; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art; Los Angeles, County Museum of Art).