The previous six drawings were derived from this painting by Chardin. To help us see composition and form without being charmed by the color, I had black-white Xerox copies for everybody to work from.
We immediately noticed that there was a triangle implied in the arrangement of peaches and cup (green line), giving these random objects a solid organization.
We had encountered the triangle in the Gainsborough landscape. https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2019/09/07/markmaking-with-gainsborough/
While the arrangement of peaches from small to large takes your eye from left to right, the knife disappearing behind the peaches leads the eye from right to left into the middle of the composition. We also noticed the crack in the table top which adds interest to that horizontal line.
That was enough to organize the students’ seeing and, without further analysis, we immersed ourselves in the drawing process.
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) painted scullery maids and piles of kitchen stuff. He seems to have been a quiet, stubborn character who paid no attention to the Versailles aristocracy at a time when satin and wigs were the only things worth painting. The style preferred by the aristocracy in the mid-18th century is called Rococo and I’ll show one painting to illustrate the boneless frivolity of that aesthetic: Boucher’s portrait of Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s mistress.
Now imagine an artist trying to make a living in Paris by insisting that a woman cleaning turnips was a subject worth painting. She looks up from her drudgery in a moment of reflection.
How can you not like Chardin. He must have had a “whadaya-lookin-at” sense of humor, depicting himself in some get up to keep out the damp weather without any regard for heroic pretentiousness.
Getting back to analyzing his still life, I could not find the Golden Section as such in this painting, but he has two perfect squares (pink and red) which hold this composition together and make it compelling to look at.
For a review of the Golden Section, see https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/the-golden-section-in-beas-painting/
For more insights into how still life paintings work:
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/sit-perfectly-still-be-moved/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2012/12/25/still-life-a-misnomer/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/still-life-momento-mori/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/still-life-with-doll/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/08/21/turbulent-still-life/
The six student drawings derived from Chardin’s painging:
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/05/12/still-life-with-peaches-pear-and-cup-1/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/05/13/still-life-with-peaches-pear-and-cup-2/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/05/14/still-life-with-peaches-pear-and-cup-3/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/05/15/still-life-with-peaches-pear-and-cup-4/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/05/16/still-life-with-peaches-pear-and-cup-5/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/06/08/4044/
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 