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Lot Essay
First published as a work by Chardin in 1938 in the catalogue accompanying an exhibition of the collection of Gösta Stenman in Stockholm, and then more extensively by E. Goldschmidt in 1945 in his monograph on the artist, the present painting is signed and dated 1730. Despite this, until recently, its attribution to Chardin had been questioned, and it was largely excluded from the scholarly literature on the painter. It returned to broader consideration with its inclusion in the landmark retrospective of Chardin’s art organized for Paris, Cleveland and Boston in 1979 by Pierre Rosenberg. Even then, Rosenberg hesitated to endorse the attribution unreservedly, cataloguing the picture as ‘CHARDIN (?)’, while nevertheless acknowledging the numerous reasons supporting Chardin as its author. The exhibition itself seems to have substantiated the painting’s authenticity for Rosenberg, and shortly thereafter he published it without hesitation in Chardin: New Thoughts (1983) and subsequently in his catalogue raisonné of the artist’s works, co-authored with Renaud Temperini (1999).
Misplaced doubts about the picture were founded, in part, on its date – 1730 – which, if you believed it, necessitated a reconsideration of the well-established narrative of Chardin’s artistic development. Having aspired to become a history painter, Chardin began his career painting ambitious, if somewhat clumsy, multi-figural genre scenes, such as The Game of Billiards (c. 1725; Musée Carnavalet, Paris), which served as signboards for local businesses. Insufficiently trained and awkward in his mastery of figure drawing, Chardin abandoned such figural genre scenes around 1725-26 and turned his attention to painting small kitchen still lifes and depictions of dead game. According to his earliest biographers, the artist did not take up figure painting again until around 1733, when he began to produce genre paintings in the taste of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters, the first of which was ‘La Fontaine’ (sold Christie’s, Paris, 22 November 2022, lot 7). The present painting proves that the artist did not abandon genre painting in this seven or eight year interval, and his output remained more varied than long-standing orthodoxies had admitted.
Despite small weaknesses in the picture’s execution, notably in the landscape setting – landscape being a genre the artist rarely undertook and never mastered – the evidence of Chardin’s hand was always in plain sight. The signature and date on the painting are authentic and have withstood technical analysis. The curious spaniel at the lower left is identical to the dog in Chardin’s large canvas, The Water Spaniel (private collection; formerly the Roberto Polo collection), a highly accomplished hunt painting that is also dated 1730. A preliminary study for the smiling boy in a tricorne hat was in the collection of the Goncourt brothers, where it was attributed to Chardin, an identification dating to at least 1791. (Although the drawing itself is lost, we know it through an etching by Edmond de Goncourt.) The still life arrayed on the ground in the lower right includes a ceramic pitcher, bowl and a woven basket that the artist owned and included in many of his paintings of the period. Finally, as Rosenberg notes, it displays the ‘savoureux empatêments’ (‘juicy impasto’) that is a defining characteristic of Chardin’s inimitable technique.
What remains uncertain is the picture’s subject matter. Commonly called the ‘Boïte du prestidigitateur’ (‘The Conjurer’s Box’), it depicts a young woman carrying a long wooden box under her arm, arriving at the door of a rustic house. She appears startled and surprised at seeing a man in the house smoking, whose presence is revealed by the cheerful boy who swings open the door. Another figure and a spaniel observe the encounter from the sidelines. Rosenberg proposes that it might represent an illustration of an episode in a popular novel, or a colloquial saying or proverb of the eighteenth century that was once commonplace but now forgotten. Whatever the intent of its subject, however, the painting represents an important inflection point in the artist’s work between the ‘scènes populaires’ with which he began his career, and the celebrated genre scenes he would introduce three years later and which are today recognized as among the masterpieces of French art.
Misplaced doubts about the picture were founded, in part, on its date – 1730 – which, if you believed it, necessitated a reconsideration of the well-established narrative of Chardin’s artistic development. Having aspired to become a history painter, Chardin began his career painting ambitious, if somewhat clumsy, multi-figural genre scenes, such as The Game of Billiards (c. 1725; Musée Carnavalet, Paris), which served as signboards for local businesses. Insufficiently trained and awkward in his mastery of figure drawing, Chardin abandoned such figural genre scenes around 1725-26 and turned his attention to painting small kitchen still lifes and depictions of dead game. According to his earliest biographers, the artist did not take up figure painting again until around 1733, when he began to produce genre paintings in the taste of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters, the first of which was ‘La Fontaine’ (sold Christie’s, Paris, 22 November 2022, lot 7). The present painting proves that the artist did not abandon genre painting in this seven or eight year interval, and his output remained more varied than long-standing orthodoxies had admitted.
Despite small weaknesses in the picture’s execution, notably in the landscape setting – landscape being a genre the artist rarely undertook and never mastered – the evidence of Chardin’s hand was always in plain sight. The signature and date on the painting are authentic and have withstood technical analysis. The curious spaniel at the lower left is identical to the dog in Chardin’s large canvas, The Water Spaniel (private collection; formerly the Roberto Polo collection), a highly accomplished hunt painting that is also dated 1730. A preliminary study for the smiling boy in a tricorne hat was in the collection of the Goncourt brothers, where it was attributed to Chardin, an identification dating to at least 1791. (Although the drawing itself is lost, we know it through an etching by Edmond de Goncourt.) The still life arrayed on the ground in the lower right includes a ceramic pitcher, bowl and a woven basket that the artist owned and included in many of his paintings of the period. Finally, as Rosenberg notes, it displays the ‘savoureux empatêments’ (‘juicy impasto’) that is a defining characteristic of Chardin’s inimitable technique.
What remains uncertain is the picture’s subject matter. Commonly called the ‘Boïte du prestidigitateur’ (‘The Conjurer’s Box’), it depicts a young woman carrying a long wooden box under her arm, arriving at the door of a rustic house. She appears startled and surprised at seeing a man in the house smoking, whose presence is revealed by the cheerful boy who swings open the door. Another figure and a spaniel observe the encounter from the sidelines. Rosenberg proposes that it might represent an illustration of an episode in a popular novel, or a colloquial saying or proverb of the eighteenth century that was once commonplace but now forgotten. Whatever the intent of its subject, however, the painting represents an important inflection point in the artist’s work between the ‘scènes populaires’ with which he began his career, and the celebrated genre scenes he would introduce three years later and which are today recognized as among the masterpieces of French art.