Glass of Water and Coffee Pot

Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin

Glass of Water and Coffee Pot

Oil on Canvas, Painting

32 cm x 41.3 cm

1760

            Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779) was born in Paris, the son of a cabinetmaker, and rarely left the city. He lived on the Left Bank near Saint-Sulpice until 1757, when Louis XV granted him a studio and living quarters in the Louvre. Chardin's work had little in common with the Rococo painting that dominated French art in the 18th century. To Chardin this theatrical approach reduced art to some kind of intellectual conversation piece. The items he portrayed from his own home were selected for their shapes, textures and colors, rather than for any symbolic meaning they may have had. They were simply painted to convey the visual pleasure he experienced in looking at them. What Chardin strove for was an overall effect: a unity of tone, color and form. Chardin would prime his canvases with a brownish pigment, sometimes tinted with red or green. This would give him a neutral background to paint on. On this he would brush in the darkest tones, then the mid-tones, and finally the highlights. When he arrived at the correct tonal balance, he would add color, being careful to maintain the overall harmony. He would finally complete the work by going over it again with the colors he had already used in order to create the reflections and highlights that tune and unify the composition.

One critic wrote, “To look at pictures by other artists it seems that I need to borrow a different pair of eyes. To look at those of Chardin, I only have to keep the eyes that nature gave me and make good use of them.”

In ‘Glass of Water and Coffee Pot’ the same white that is used for the cloves of garlic is echoed in the reflections from the glass on one side and in the burnished highlights of the copper coffee pot on the other. The range of browns across the picture are united by a subtle hint of the green of the garlic leaves. Chardin's 'Glass of Water and Coffee Pot' contains many of the key elements of his deceptively simple still lifes. The glass and coffee pot are both truncated cones, but the shape of one is an inversion of the other. The balance of these two opposite forms creates a dialogue between their shapes. This balance of opposites continues through other elements: the glass is light, transparent, cold, smooth and reflective, while the coffee pot is dark, opaque, warm, rough and charred with soot. Chardin balances the tonal values of the glass and the coffee pot by creating a counterchange with the background. He carefully graduates the tone of the background from dark on the right to light on the left. It is the harmonies and contrasts that he builds into the visual elements of these ordinary objects that make this painting extraordinary.

            The reason this piece was chosen was for the simplicity and the harmony. As Chardin puts it, there is beauty in the everyday items that we don’t see because we are too close. When He puts these items together, there is a geometrical beauty in the symmetry and a beauty in contrast. One may have seen these elements every morning and not even noticed them, and yet when they are pulled aside and looked at in “the right light” one can see how beautiful they are. I love the simplicity because the viewer then stops and looks at three or four simple object and focuses on what the value is in them. The viewer’s eyes are drawn to the symmetry without even realizing what is happening. There’s not much to the picture, but the artist wanted to show the beauty in simplicity instead of extravagance, which is why it was chosen for this gallery.