Boucher and Chardin at the Wallace Collection

Tag : painted porcelain.

Art has a handy way of dividing its practitioners into contrastingpairs so that the differences between them are easier to spot.Think how much simpler it is to characterise Gainsborough withReynolds around to supply the opposites. Think Delacroix andIngres; Picasso and Matisse; Caravaggio and Carracci. In all theircases, a pioneering set of aesthetic values appears to beencountering its alternatives. It is a process that achieved somesort of absurd rococo crescendo in the matching careers of Chardinand Boucher.
Chalk and cheese have nothing on these two. Boucher wouldunquestionably feature near the summit of my personal top 10 ofregrettable artists. Sly, sycophantic, corrupt and giggly, thisbouncy peddler of soft porn was Madame de Pompadour’sfavourite artist. Anyone wishing to understand why the FrenchRevolution had to happen need only examine a handful of Bouchers.The stink of French 18th-century corruption wafts up from his art.
Chardin, on the other hand, was a truly heroic presence. Surroundedby fops and fools, in a century that specialised in frippery, hemanaged somehow to create a body of work that impresses us with itssolemnity and its weight. In his austere kitchen still lifes,Chardin could give a well-scrubbed copper saucepan the moralauthority of a high-court judge. His entire career accuses histimes of slightness.
Having said all that, it probably needs admitting that nothing inart could ever be this clear cut. The possibility that Boucher wasnot all bad and that Chardin was not all good deserves a moment ofconsideration. And London’s prettiest museum, the WallaceCollection, is displaying uncharacteristic meatiness in building afine exhibition around the telling contrast between Boucher’sWoman on a Daybed and Chardin’s Lady Taking Tea.
Painted within a decade of each other, both of these pint-sizeddisplays of French rococo thinking feature a woman, an interior anda teapot. Chardin’s woman, from 1735, is actually drinkingher tea. Boucher’s, from 1743, has merely collected thefashionable porcelain that goes with it, and her unused teapot ison show behind her on an ornamental shelf. Were this the handiworkof someone else, it might be possible to accept that the picturehas no sly or secret ambition to address the subject of sex. Butthis is Boucher. So we can be 100% certain that the woman on thedaybed is displaying herself to collectors as pertly and enticinglyas an expensive teapot in a Sotheby’s window.
Tea turns out to have had an amusing social history, which theWallace Collection skates over entertainingly at the start of itseffort. Arriving originally from China, as part of the huge wave oforiental fashions that was to have such a powerful impact on18th-century European tastes, tea seems to have been remarkablycontroversial at first. Half the medical fraternity applauded itsmedicinal properties, the other half warned of its grave dangers.According to Simon Paulli, author of the first authoritativemedicinal guide to tea, published in 1635, this terrible foreignsubstance causes “effeminacy and impotence” in itsdrinkers. Others insisted that it led to “miscarriage anddiminution of beauty” among women.
The show also throws a couple of hilarious Hogarths into the mix tomake clear the abominable fashionableness of tea. Hogarth, whomistrusted anything that originated beyond the English Channel,particularly if the French liked it, has enormous fun mocking anageing English countess for drinking tea from a porcelain cup nobigger than a thimble, and for having a French cook, personified bya monkey in a beret, who holds up a menu featuring“duck’s tongues, rabbits’ ears and snails”.
If Hogarth were around today, he would be working for The DailyMail and calling himself Richard Littlejohn. It is vicious stuff.
Hogarth’s incorrigible English need to mock and sneer leadsto some decent belly laughs, but profundity is beyond his reach, sothe arrival of Chardin in the display is doubly welcome. We cancompare him not only with Boucher, but with Hogarth, too. In boththeir cases, it is as if two noisy schoolboys have had their iPodsconfiscated so the adults can speak.
The display does not actually hang the Boucher next to the Chardin,as we might have expected, probably because a mouse can never lookimpressive next to an elephant. A direct comparison would haverelegated the Boucher to the third division. It is a much smallerpicture, anyway, not much bigger than the front page of The SundayTimes, whereas the Chardin is the size of a widescreen telly.Instead of hanging them side by side, the show gives us twomini-exhibitions built interestingly around them.
Boucher’s Woman on a Daybed usually hangs in the delightfulFrick Collection, in New York, surrounded by Louis XV fauteuils andSèvres porcelain that perhaps exaggerate the softness of itsmood. Stripped of rococo finery in this display, the pictureacquires a harsher, more predatory presence. The woman, whoseidentity is unknown, lounges provocatively on her daybed and greetsyour arrival on the scene with a coquettish sideways smile. Ifspiders had faces, this, perhaps, is how they would feignindifference when an unsuspecting fly approaches the web.
The disarray of the woman’s clothes, the carelessly opendrawer by her daybed, even the big cascade of yellow silk at herfeet, seem to speak of moral corruption. Underneath all the prettyrococo surfaces, Boucher appears to be hinting at powerfulundercurrents of sexuality and violence. Even the porcelain teapotthat is supposed to symbolise the owner’s fashionableness isso messily displayed that it, too, ends up drawing attention to herturpitude.
I have to admit that Boucher impressed me more than I wasexpecting. His art has a knowing cunningness to it that gets turnedon the viewer as well as the sitter. Yes, he is a peddler of softporn, but the exact course of his intentions remains fascinatinglyunchartable. Chardin is more solemn and less cunning. Lady TakingTea belongs to the Hunterian, in Glasgow, where its particularlypale and austere brand of rococo appears to chime well withregional preferences. There is something so unFrench about Chardin:so modest and Protestant and plain.
In this instance, we know that the woman is probably his wife, andthat she is taking tea for medicinal reasons. Tea was supposed tohelp those who were “short of breath”; and, in reallife, Chardin’s wife died of lung disease in the year thepicture was painted. Knowing what we know about her, it isdifficult to resist the idea that some recognition of her fate isfuelling her self-absorption. The pearly touches with which Chardincaptures the wisps of steam rising from the cup that she stirs soabsent-mindedly, and the thoughtful shadow that has fallen acrossher face, are masterfully done. Even if we knew nothing about her,we would certainly sense her melancholy.
She, too, has an open drawer at her table, not because she is auseless housekeeper, like Boucher’s bedroom wench, butbecause she has neatly taken out the cutlery she needs for her sadlittle tea ceremony, and will neatly put it back again in a moment.The big, clunky teapot seems to be watching over her, as if it wereChardin himself. And something poignant is being said about thehope invested in a cup of tea.
Boucher & Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners, WallaceCollection, W1, until September 7