Although the career of painter Jean Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) played out entirely in Paris, his work was so brilliant that this specialist in still lifes and genre scenes became one of the most famous European artists of the 18th century.
He was unanimously elected to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture as an artist ‘of talent for animals and fruits’ upon his first presentation in 1728. His first masterpiece, The Ray (1728, Musée du Louvre), was an immediate sensation. Subsequently, the artist established himself as a particularly delicate portraitist (Boy with Spinning-Top, 1738, Musée du Louvre) and a genre painter of remarkable subtlety (Saying Grace and The Diligent Mother, 1740; the two paintings, preserved at the Musée du Louvre, were offered by the artist as gifts to King Louis XV).
Beginning in the 1750s, Chardin dedicated himself principally to the still life, which he approached in a new manner. His compositions became sparer, but still arranged according to the aesthetic of ‘beautiful disorder’ that distinguishes Basket of Strawberries. Critics of the time, and Denis Diderot in particular, praised the apparent simplicity of these compositions where the painter nonetheless managed to suggest the illusion of reality as though by ‘magic’. Chardin then reached the pinnacle of his career and enjoyed pan-European recognition, from the German principalities to the Russia of Catherine the Great. During the 1760s he continued to fulfill prestigious royal commissions by painting ambitious still lifes to decorate the châteaux of Choisy (1765, including Attributes of the Arts, Musée du Louvre) and Bellevue (1767, including Instruments of Civilian Music, Musée du Louvre). During his final decade, he painted his last masterpieces in pastel, including some touching self-portraits.
