Room 112
Jean Siméon Chardin
1699–1779, France (Paris), Rococo, genre and still-life painting
Chardin painted what others overlooked: a jug, a few pieces of fruit, a child building a house of cards, a maid at work. At a time when the Paris Academy valued history and mythological painting above all, he showed the quiet of ordinary moments – with soft light and thick, almost granular paint. The writer Denis Diderot called him a magician.