Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin took a fifteen year hiatus from still lifes. instead doing mostly domestic genre works, many that he is famous now for. his return to still life would be concurrent with a royal pension and residency at the Louvre. access to far wealthier objet d’art would change the dressings of the canvasses into a wider array of luxury, for example the delft vase in the floral still life above.
Blessedly, Chardin still often holds on to his irregular slab surfaces in these later works. The palette tends towards more mid-range compositions and the greater inclusion of whites added back into the finished work. The edges tend towards being lost in shadow or at least darker ranges. The strata tends to be very precarious between foreground and background now, often with the composition taking much more precedent over light-logic. Raking cast shadows help to enforce the little horizontal movement in the work. Tension is controlled with subtle light/dark but these pieces really excel in how they play warm/cool against soft/hard edges. A feat impossible to reproduce in small quick pen sketches. And yet, i take notes…
my apologies to the great master with my paltry sketches.
Among his less savory qualities, he's a poor sport, a sore loser and ill fitted for honest labor. He makes bad friends and worse decisions. Animals avoid him and children despise him. He's been known to drink to excess, carry on with seditious talk and leer at women. He's a coward, a card cheat and a known liar.
Mrs. Call's second grade class said perhaps all that needed to be said about Larsen.In a moment of vindication and possibly clarity, Call would add to Larsen's permanent record that he was a bit of a dreamer and that Larsen was "an excellent student but his grades trailed off in the final semester."True, Larsen was filled with promise and saddled as starry-eyed but one can't help but notice that Call's inability to chisel this raffish diamond-in-rough wasn't also a clerical trick to distance herself from the responsibility of the 'Nurture' debate.She also said he was "prompt".She wasn't wrong.
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