New paintings at Waddesdon Manor
The collections at Waddesdon have been enhanced by the recent acquisition of four major paintings, by Callet, Chardin and Panini, described here by Juliet Carey.
Juliet Carey, Monday, 25th August 2008
When he was furnishing Waddesdon Manor, Ferdinand Rothschild bemoaned the difficulty of getting hold of really good French paintings. He surely would have applauded the acquisition of an early masterpiece by one of the greatest of all French painters, Chardin’s Boy Building a House of Cards (Fig. 9).9 Its self-contained stillness contrasts with the splendour of its new setting, yet it resonates with existing aspects of the collection, from games and the representation of childhood to the influence of Northern genre painting on French art.
A child playing – with cards, bubbles, spinning- top or shuttlecock – was a favourite subject of Chardin’s. Such scenes, with their intimations of the transitory nature of human life, were derived from 16th- and 17th-century Dutch and Flemish vanitas, but display a delight in childhood for its own sake, absent from those. Nicolas Lancret’s Allegory of Air (c. 1730) at Waddesdon is another painting in which the card house is emblematic of childhood and the vanity of human ambitions. Chardin depicted a young adolescent building a house of cards on at least four occasions. The fragile paper edifice embodies the fleeting nature of childhood; the cards the role of chance. The jack in the drawer in the Waddesdon painting hints at rascalry. The prominent ace of hearts might represent the precariousness of love. Another version is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (c. 1735; Fig. 6). A rather painterly and romantic treatment of the subject is in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (c. 1737; Fig. 7). The boy in the crisp variation in the National Gallery, London (c. 1737; Fig. 8), is the son of a friend of the artist, the furniture dealer and cabinet-maker Jean-Jacques Le Noir. These paintings show Chardin exploring the possibilities of composition, colour, tone and mood in a subject, the act of placing a card, that allowed him to create different conjunctions of touch and sight. In the boys’ facial expressions he embodied to different degrees absorption, alertness, and musing. Subtle differences in age and clothing hint at distinctions between idleness and leisure. In contrast with Master Le Noir’s gentility, the aprons worn by the Waddesdon and Washington boys suggest they may be servants supposed to be clearing up after a gaming party.
The Waddesdon painting has a more elaborate setting than the others. The red curtain with its golden tassel adds a note of opulence. A screen is just visible on the right of the boy; the artist himself probably painted it out (since it is not present in prints after the picture, and the signature is askew in relation to it). Chardin’s sparer treatments of the subject concentrated the solitary self-absorption of the child. In the Waddesdon painting the window, and the curtain drawn aside to reveal it, acknowledge the existence of the world outside and dramatise the spectator’s presence. The drawer jutting into the viewer’s space teases us with its spatial illusionism. The painting is intimate, yet monumental; sombre, but luminous. Against the strong verticals and horizontals of the wall, cord, table and card house, the viewer’s attention is caught by the invisible diagonal that links the boy’s eye to the card that he is trying to balance with his right hand.
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