chardin and still life

Chardin and the Text of Still LifeAuthor(s): Norman BrysonReviewed work(s):Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Winter, 1989), pp. 227-252Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343584 .Accessed: 01/02/2012 21:48

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Chardin and the Text of Still Life

Norman Bryson

It can sometimes be that when a great artist works in a particular genre, what is done within that genre can make one see as if for the first time what that genre really is, why for centuries the genre has been important, what its logic is, and what, in the end, that genre isfor. I want to suggest that this is so in the case of Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, and in the case of still life. Chardin's still life painting can reveal, as almost no other classical painting of still life can, what is at stake in still life, and what it is that made still life one of the enduring categories of classical European painting. Understanding Chardin can force us right back to the fun- damentals of the genre, to still life's origins in antiquity, and to the

extraordinary development of the genre in the seventeenth century. Here I will be trying to investigate the genre of still life in the light of what Chardin's work reveals about it. In a sense I will be treating Chardin as a critic, and not only as a painter, though everything he has to say about the genre is said in paint, and not as argument. If we can see Chardin's work with eyes fresh enough, we can let Chardin reveal to us still life's inner logic, its specific problems and solutions, and not only his solutions, but the solutions other still life painters work towards. In fact we probably have to turn to a painter to understand what still life is concerned with. It has always been the least discussed and the least theorised of the classical genres, and even today it is hard to find discussions of still life at a level of sophistication comparable to that of history painting, landscape, or portraiture. It is the genre farthest from language, and so the hardest for discourse to reach. There is no obvious tradition of theoretical work

Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989)

? 1989 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/89/1502-0002$l01.00. All rights reserved.

227

228 Norman Bryson The Text of Still Life

on still life, and in these circumstances it is appropritate to turn to a

painter's practice for guidance. But first I need to make some preliminary observations about a striking and defining feature of the genre: its exclusion of the human form, and its seeming assault on the value and prestige of the human subject.

In history painting we see the human form more or less idealised, and in portraiture we see the human form more or less as it is, but in still life we never see the human form at all. Physical exclusion is only the first of still life's negations of the kinds of human-centred dignity we are used to finding in the other genres. Removal of the human body is the founding move of the genre of still life, but this foundation would be precarious if all that were needed to destroy it were the body's physical return: the disappearance of the human subject might represent only a

provisional state of affairs, if the body is just round the corner, and likely to reenter the field of vision at any moment. Human presence is not

only expelled physically; still life also expels the values human presence imposes on the world. While history painting is structured around narrative, still life is the world minus its narratives, or better, the world minus its

capacity for generating narrative interest. To narrate is to name what is

unique: the singular actions of individual persons. And narrative works hard to explain why any particular story is worth narrating, because the actions in the story are heroic or wonderful, or frightening or ignoble, or bad or good. The whole principle of storytelling is jeopardised or

paralysed by the hearer's objection: 'So what'? But still life loves the 'so what'. It exactly breaks with narrative's scale of human importance. It shows what it shows simply because 'these things were there'. Its loyalty is to objects, not to human significance. The human subject is not only physically exiled: the scale of values on which narrative and history painting are based is erased also.

This is so from the earliest stages of the genre. In Greek painting there is 'megalography', the depictions of those things in the world that are great-the legends of the gods, the battles of heroes, the crises of human history. And there is also 'rhopography', the depiction of those things in the world that lack importance, the unassuming material base of life that 'importance' constantly overlooks. The categories of megalography and rhopography are intertwined. The concept of 'importance' can arise only by separating itself from what it declares to be trivial and

Norman Bryson is professor of comparative literature at the University of Rochester and editor of the series Cambridge New Art History and Criticism. He is the author of Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (1984) and the editor of Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France (1988). He is currently completing a study of still life painting, Looking at the Overlooked (1989).

Critical Inquiry Winter 1989 229

insignificant: 'importance' generates 'waste', what is sometimes called the

preterite, that which is set aside or excluded. Still life takes on the ex-

ploration of what 'importance' tramples underfoot. It attends to the world

ignored by the human impulse to create greatness. Its assault on the human subject is therefore conducted on a very deep level. The subject is physically expelled. Narrative-the drama of greatness-is banished. And what is looked at overturns the standpoint on which human importance is established. Still life is unimpressed by the categories of soul, consciousness, achievement, grandeur, or the unique. The human subject that it proposes and assumes is a bodily, material entity on a par with

anything else in the material field. It is severed from value, greatness, and singularity. This is the first of still life's enduring insults to the humanist subject.

The second enduring insult comes from still life's ancient connection with illusionism (fig. 1).1 In Pompeian painting, still life is the genre where shadows freely appear, and the link between still life and trompe l'oeil is as old as the legend of Zeuxis and his still life of the grapes, so lifelike that the birds came to eat from the painted vine. The alliance between still life and trompe l'oeil runs throughout its development. It is present in all the 'architectural' themes where a still life opens out of a wall: the motif of shelves, begun in antiquity and recurring (figs. 2 and 3) in Gothic painting; the motif of shutters opening into a room of simulated pilasters and columns, at Pompeii; the motif of alcoves and niches behind the flower paintings of Italy and Holland. Trompe l'oeil

pushes to a maximum still life's idea of banishing the human subject from the world. To further its deception, it pretends that objects have not been prearranged into a composition destined for the human eye: vision does not find the objects decked out and waiting, but stumbles into them as though by chance. Thrown together as if by accident, the

objects lack syntax: no coherent purpose brings them together in the

place where we find them. Things present themselves as not awaiting human attention, or as abandoned by human attention (figs. 4 and 5). Hence the importance to still life and to trompe l'oeil of waste and debris.

They busy themselves with detritus of every kind-scraps, husks, peelings, the fraying and discoloration of paper-or else objects taken up and looked at only occasionally: quills, mirrors, watches. Goblets have over- turned and spilled, crumbs lie scattered on the table, insects settle on the fruit. Things are given over to disuse. In that effacement of human attention, objects lose the warmth of connectedness with the human

sphere: a kind of heat-death spreads out through matter, and divorced from use things revert to entropy or absurdity--suspended and waiting, disregarded.

1. On still life in antiquity, see Charles Sterling, Still Life Painting, 2d ed. (New York, 1981), pp. 25-33.


FIG. 1.-Fresco from Pompeii. First century B.c. Bowl of Fruit and Vases. Museo Nazionale, Naples.

Hyperreal, trompe l'oeil so mimics and parodies the sense of the real that it casts doubt on the human subject's place in the world, and on whether the subject in fact has a place in the world.2 For the split second when trompe l'oeil releases its effect, it induces a feeling of vertigo or shock: it is as though we were shown the appearance the world might have without a subject to perceive it, the world minus human consciousness, the look of the world before our emergence into it, or after our death.

Trompe l'oeil is reputed to be its own genre, and the belief that it is separate from the rest of painting is reassuring, in that it preserves still life from contamination by something that is uncomfortably close to itself. But trompe l'oeil is closer to still life than to any other genre: trompe l'oeil rarely risks the human figure, which it too physically expels. In fact the assumptions of trompe l'oeil to some extent inhabit still life even when there is no question of being actually duped by appearances. Juan Sainchez CotAn's painting of Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber so perfectly mimics the appearance of the real that vision is given a jolt (fig. 6). Hanging on strings, the quince and the cabbage lack the weight known to the hand. Their weightlessness mocks such intimate knowledge:

2. The vertiginous aspects of still life are explored by Jean Baudrillard, 'The Trompe- l'Oeil', in Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France, ed. Norman Bryson (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 27-52.

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FIG. 3.-Wall Painting. Ca. 1490. Niche with Liturgical Objects. Church of St. Barbara, Kutna Hora, Czechoslovakia.

FIG. 4.- Mosaic. Second century A.D. Scraps ofa Meal. Museo Laterano, Rome.

FIG. 5.-Wallerand Vaillant (1623-77), Trompe l'oeil with Letters. Gemaldgalerie, Dresden.


FIG. 6.-Juan Sinchez Cotin (1561-1627), Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber. Fine Arts Gallery, San Diego.

it obliterates the body's sense of gravity, and of scale. Painting normally diminishes things and reduces even the colossal to manageable size, but Cotin reverses this tendency, so that the objects are not miniaturised but hyperbolised, made to seem vast, or more exactly made to seem without scale-objects of indeterminate magnitude. Knowing neither great nor small, this scalelessness is that of the universe conceived without regard to the observer and the measure taken from the self (Man, the measure of all things). The observer is expelled from the scene, cancelled out, and Cotin's objects seem to picture themselves in a world existing before the subject entered, or after departing from it.

Still life's third insult to the human subject is a variation on this: the subject who looks out at the scene of still life is made to feel no bond of continuous life with the objects that fill the scene. It proposes and assumes a viewing subject who looks at things without from a field within the self, and experiences disconnection. Still life assumes a position vis-A-vis things in which 'self' and 'things' remain fundamentally separated from each other. The individual viewer is presented as an island of consciousness looking out across a sea of objectified matter, as though the living connection between the human self and the world of things had been broken. Hence


the morte in nature morte: there is no living bond between the watcher subject and the objectified field (figs. 7 and 8). Living creatures are killed before this gaze-perhaps only the insects can survive it. Partridge, hare, fish, and mollusc: such things appear intact, but with the breath of their life snuffed out. This lifelessness is not only a matter of actual death. The power to immobilise, to petrify appearances, and to objectify everything in the visual field belongs to the gaze of still life, which polarises subject and object. The universe inhabited by that gaze is quite naturally a universe of death. On the one hand, the gaze of still life establishes the subject as a reality that is beyond all doubt and that occupies the position of centre with regard to everything else outside it. On the other hand, the things of the world appear as having no living bond with this watchful subject locked up inside the self: things enter a cold and alien realm of death. Such killing objectification comes, in trompe l'oeil, to threaten even the subject, who looks at the world as though from a standpoint of personal annihilation. It is no accident that in Dutch still life of the seventeenth century, the death's head can feature at the centre of the scene. This is more than an iconographic nod in the direction of 'Vanity'. Still life's vision conceives of objectivity as the negation of what lives and breathes. Its illusionism pushes the world further and further away from the subject, and as this happens the world comes to appear as so much raw material, under the authority of the human subject and serving its every need, or appetite; but the world can appear also as cold, inhuman, and fundamentally inhospitable to this mastering subject. The duality and contradiction between subject and object is something still life explores to its outer limit.

These three assaults on the human subject give to still life what is potentially the most chilling, deadly, lethal kind of vision one may encounter

FIG. 7.-Balthasar van der Ast (1593 or 1594-1657), Shells. Museum Boymans-Van Beuinngen, Rotterdam.


FIG. 8.-Giovanni Battista Recco (ca. 1628-ca. 1675), Display of Seafood. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

in European painting, and perhaps in world art. Still life robs the world of human presence, and narrative value. Its illusionism implies an object world that has dispensed with human attention and in a sense makes human attention and the human subject obsolete. And its vision breaks the bond of life between the subjert who looks and the world that is seen. To sum up these remarks so far: still life makes a strange rhyme between its gaze, and death. And before we go on to see how still life counters this tendency, we can for convenience give it a name: the vision of the Medusa, or What Medusa Saw.3

However, this is not all there is to still life. It is certainly the genre where visual objectification and subject-object dualism are carried to extremes; but at the same time it redefines the relations between subject and object so that the duality instituted between them is to some extent overcome. This emerges as soon as we attend to what it is that still life so objectively and chillingly depicts. Still life generally means painting of the things within reach, unexceptional things found on tables and shelves, often (though not necessarily) food: bowls, plates, glasses, bottles, jugs, fruits, flowers, but also books, pipes, documents, and the bric-a- brac of the daily round. They are things that, either because they come from nature, or because they are intended for purposes that do not change, remain unaltered over great spans of time. The frescoes at Pompeii and Herculaneum showing such things as lobsters, birds, and vases are

3. On the issue of castration in the visual field, see Le Siminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XI, les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris, 1973), sections 6-9; trans. Alan Sheridan, under the title The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York, 1978), pp. 67-119.


FIG. 9.-Fresco from Herculaneum. First century A.D. Shells, Lobster, Vase and Bird. Museo Nazionale, Naples.

in some sense continuous with the still life of seventeenth-century Holland (fig. 9). The peaches and the glass jar half filled with water at Pompeii is not fundamentally different from the work of Cotin or Francisco de Zurbarin (fig. 10). The forms of such things as jars, plates, baskets, bowls, glasses point backwards to a long evolution in the culture that designs them. If the only requirement for a bowl or jug were to act as a viable container for solids or liquids, any object of whatever shape could be used and named as these things: their forms could be improvised at every occasion of use. Yet within any culture, certain distinct forms rec- ommend themselves as appropriate, where 'propriety' is not just a matter of bare function but of a whole network of practical activity, involving all the factors of suitedness to action, to the body, to cost, to ease of manufacture, and to available materials; in short, to an economy of practices that, eliminating what is not suitable, in the end converge on this given form, which is then passed on.

Though still life can always be accused of dealing only in odds and ends, in debris, the abiding and ancient forms chosen by still life speak of cultural forces as vast as those that in nature carve valleys from rivers and canyons from glaciers. Even their names seem demeaned-jug, jar, bowl, pitcher-yet the forms of still life have enormousforce. As human time flows around the forms, smoothing them and tending them through


countless acts of attention across countless generations, time secretes a priceless product: familiarity. The forms of the artefacts distil and stabilise human usage. They create an abiding world where the subject is naturally at ease and at home. Without that steadying hand of cultural memory, the subject would not in fact be able to produce for itself the security of any kind of home ground. The forms of the things in still life compress and stabilise the loose plurality of human times and uses: they have been decided by consensus over many eras, and feel 'right' for the job. The kind of subject proposed and assumed by still life is not, then, simply the Medusal subject, stranded and alone, staring out at an objectified field from which it is dissociated and severed. Still life also addresses the subject as one who inhabits a cultural field where he or she is not alone at all. The subject is only the present generation of the cultural family. The roots of his or her world in fact travel back into a vast preceding cultural community, which is in solidarity with each of its members.

It is here that one finds the importance to still life of the themes of appetite and food: in eating, the body experiences its full dependency on the outer world, and exactly loses the sense of separation from the object world around it. Nourishment returns the Medusal subject to a dependent home ground, where self-existence requires the existence of everything else in order to sustain life. And the nourishment is also social:

FIG. 10.--Fresco from Pompeii. First Century. Peaches and GlassJar. Museo Nazionale, Naples.


it is not simply feeding. Still life is never far from the ritual of the meal, and its space is not just creatural, but interpersonal. The Greek word for still life, xenia, actually refers to the food supplies that, according to Greek custom, the host presented each day to his guests for them to

prepare for themselves, as part of the ceremony of bringing the outsider into the oikos, or household. Eating is not necessarily convivial: but even in solitude, eating brings with it a certain minimum of display, of theatre, and it is in this theatre that all of still life is staged. There is always at least one extra person: the viewer. Even when no one else registers his or her presence, the viewer is always in someone's domestic space, and

belongs in the household. The subject proposed and assumed by still life has, then, a complex

definition. He (or she, or it) is the watcher ego, gazing out onto an

objective field. The universe before him or her is in some ways inimical to human presence, and has no room for grandeur or the splendour and heroics of the individual self. There is something at work in still life's vision that breaks the field of being into a painful dualism, with the

solitary ego on one side, dead matter on the other. But at the same time still life works to return that cold outer world to human warmth and a human embrace. The viewer is addressed as a generic cultural subject, and this beckoning counters the discomfort of subjective solitude. Although the image interpellates the viewer at a single point of time, the temporality of its forms includes the viewer in the widest possible temporal horizon, a temporality of the collective and of cultural solidarity. And the viewer is addressed through the most unmistakable and universal rituals of

hospitality, as a guest at table. There is, then, a kind of potential equilibrium at work in still life.

Still life certainly possesses a tendency towards atomic solitude in vision, and towards a split between the inner, self-enclosed subject and the

objectified nature morte that spreads out before it. Its dualism can be

chilling and deathly, and with part of its being it explores the chasm that can open up between the subject and the world. But at the same time it works to return the objectified world back towards the subject, to pull all of space back towards the warm, creatural cocoon round the body. Here the subject can reexperience its solidarity with human fellowship, as well as its dependency on nature. It can feel the living bond of continuity with the nourishing outer world, and a sheer creatureliness in which it is not a solitary ego, but a generic body united with its culture and a full member of the social field.

Nevertheless, this equilibrium between what one might call 'Medusal' and 'anti-Medusal' tendencies is rarely stable, and if one looks at certain crucial developments within the still life tradition before Chardin one can see how precarious the balance of its internal structure can be. I have space to single out just a few developments, and to point to how in Chardin's work ways are devised to return still life to something like


an internal equilibrium. The first of these is disequilibrium of attention. To sense what this means, let us return to Spanish still life, which we saw just now in Cotin.4 In its quality of attention, still life possesses a delicate and ambiguous instrument. Its whole project forces the subject, both painter and viewer, to attend closely to the preterite objects in the world, which, exactly because they are so familiar, elude normal attention. Since still life needs to look at the overlooked, and to dwell on the consoling familiarities of appetite and of hospitality, it has to bring into view objects that perception normally screens out. The problem is that in bringing into consciousness and into visibility what perception normally overlooks, the visual field can come to appear radically unfamiliar, and estranged. Consider again Cotin's Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber (fig. 6). The attention invested in its objects certainly brings forth their reticent visibility, and the beauty or the extraordinariness it finds could hardly have a location more mundane-a sort of larder, where for preservation the

cabbage and the quince have been hung on string. But precisely because the location is so ordinary, the quality of attention brought to bear on the objects stands quite outside normal experience and the normal domestic round. Defamiliarisation confers on these things a dramatic objecthood, but the intensity of the perception at work makes for such a surplus of

appearances that the image and its objects seem not quite of this world. In the routine spaces still life explores, habit makes one see through a

glass, darkly; but when the object is revealed face to face, the departure from the habitual blurs, and entropies of vision can be so drastic that the objects seem unreal, unfamiliar, uncreatural. Still life's project of

'returning' the objectified field to the human subject aims to establish a warm and companionable dwelling for the subject, and this encourages it to seek out abiding forms and familiar shapes. And in order to bring these consoling and familiar things into view, the quality of attention must switch from habit to defamiliarisation. Yet pushed too far, defamiliarisation starts to run against the whole movement of 'return'. The

objects depicted by Cotin look unheimlich, and belong less to the cocoon of nearness than to a kind of eerie outer space. Defamiliarisation starts to concur with still life's other tendency, to drive objects out and away from the subject. One sees a similar process in Zurbari*n: Lemons, Oranges, and Rose shows a visual field so purified and so perfectly composed that the familiar objects seem on the brink of transfiguration, or transub- stantiation (fig. 11). Standing at some imminent intersection with the divine, and with eternity, they exactly break with the normally human.5

4. See Eric Young, 'New Perspectives on Spanish Still Life Painting of the Golden

Age', Burlington Magazine 118 (Apr. 1976): 203-14; J. Gudiol Ricart, 'Natures mortes de Sanches Cotin (1561-1627)', Pantheon 35 (Oct.-Dec. 1977): 311-18; and Sterling, Still

Life Painting, pp. 92-101. 5. See H. P. G. Seckel, 'Francisco de Zurbaran as a Painter of Still-Life', Gazette des

Beaux-Arts 30 (Oct.-Dec. 1946): 279.

FIG. 11.-Francisco de Zurbarain (1598-1664), Lemons, Oranges, and Rose. The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.


This is not to criticise these paintings, but to point to a contradiction between ends and means, between familiarity and defamiliarisation, which both Cotain and Zurbarin directly engage. Exactly because the quality of attention is so important to still life, and it is by entering a field of

quickened attention that its objects come into their full objecthood, man-

agement of attention is crucial. When driven to extremes, attention not only reintroduces an interval

between the perceiving self and the object world, it separates the self from other selves: contradiction reemerges in the social field. Still life can hardly avoid quickening perception, but beyond a certain point the self becomes again enclosed within itself, saturated with perceptions now of a manic intensity. The subject stares or glares at the world. The kind of attention provoked by still life isolates both painter and viewer from the rather hazy, rather lazy visual field the subject normally inhabits. This isolation runs counter to still life's wish for conviviality and hospitality. The whole thematic of the meal points in the direction of civil society, where the self reexperiences its grounding in the social field, together with others, and this movement towards a social or collective subject compensates for the isolation in space and time that 'Medusal' vision inflicts on the subject. At table, the subject is reembraced by humanity and rejoins the cultural communities of both present and past. Defam-

iliarising the table through a surplus of appearances takes away the warmth of this solidarity and its embrace.

Adjusting the forces of defamiliarity and familiarity in the social field can become a matter of extraordinary tension. If the balance is

right, a harmony can be created where the subject is individually unique and yet a member of civil society, a creature of habit and of perceptual revelation. Lubin Baugin's Dessert with Wafers (fig. 12) does, I think, show such a harmony, together with all the tensions that produce it.6 Pushed further, the fastidiousness of its composition and its love of the immaculate would cut the subject off from the social field and its hospitality. Raised to a pitch just a bit higher, and the intensity of its perceptions would

generate a manic glare and disconnection between the subject and the world of things. Baugin resolves the tension by proposing a social field that, though welcoming, still insists on the formalities. The dessert is not

primarily intended as nourishment, but as social pleasure: the wafers tilt out to the viewer, as though inviting him or her to take one; and there is more wine in the flask. Baugin balances the creatural against the social

subject, and implies a society careful to integrate what is creatural with a genuine social and aesthetic grace.

Chardin's solution to the problem of defamiliarisation is to cultivate a studied informality of attention, which looks at nothing in particular

6. See Sterling, Les peintres de la rdaliti en France au XVII sidcle (exhibition catalogue, Orangerie, Paris, 1934).


FIG. 12.-Lubin Baugin (ca. 1611-63), Dessert with Wafers. Mus&e du Louvre, Paris.

(figs. 13 and 14). He shows no signs of wanting to tighten up the loose world of the interiors he presents. On the contrary, his own intervention is unassuming, and seems so ordinary as to relax rather than heighten attention.7 This is clearest in his compositional technique. Usually composition involves a staging of the scene before the viewer, a spectacular interval or proscenium frame between the subject and the scene. The placement of the wafers in Baugin's Dessert with Wafers, for example, is calculated with immense and evident pains. But Chardin avoids composition of this self-conscious kind. He does not want to disturb the world or to reorganise it before the subject, as though to do so would be to keep the viewer at arm's length and to push him or her out from the scene, when what is valued is exactly the way the scene welcomes the viewer in without ceremony, to take things as he or she finds them. For the same reason his compositions tend to avoid priorities: one thing is not intrinsically more important than another; to suggest otherwise would be to upset the evenness of regard as it moves with equal interest and equal engagement across the visual field. Chardin undoes the hierarchy between zones that

7. See Michael Baxandall's excellent discussion of the problem of focus in Chardin's work, in Patterns of Intention: An Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, Conn., 1985), pp. 74-104.


FIG. 13.-Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779), The Cut Melon. Private collection, Paris.

composition normally aims for, by giving everything the same degree of attention, or inattention; so that the details, as they emerge, are striking only because of the gentle pressures bearing down on them from the rest of the painting.

For the same reason also, all the forms tend towards blur-perhaps Chardin's greatest formal innovation-as though he were trying to paint peripheral as well as central vision, and in this way to suggest a familiarity with the objects in the visual field on such intimate and friendly terms that nothing any more needs to be vigilantly watched. The scene contains no surprises and harbours no shocks, and vision can relax its grip. The blurring of the forms marks a kind of homecoming of the subject into the ground of being: the sign that we really are at home in this world is that we no longer have to strain our eyes.


FIG. 14.-Chardin, Jar of Apricots. Toronto, Art Gallery of Toronto.

The balance between 'Medusal' vision and 'anti-Medusal' vision is a delicate matter, and Chardin's preference for an informal blurring of forms can be thought of as a critique of still life's tendency to dwell for too long on the face of familiarity, and thereby to produce visual unease. But the balance can be upset by another potent force, that of display.

At its deepest level, still life addresses the subject in direct and creatural terms, as entitled to human hospitality and the hand of friendship. This strategy forces still life to examine not only what furthers the human embrace, but also what prevents it. In fact, as still life intimately knows, human solidarity is broken at every point by class. It is only at an ideal level that human 'warmth' and 'nourishment' appear. In practice, the subject exists as a member of a stratified society. From countless possible examples, take the Peaches and Silver Platters of Francois Desportes (fig.


FIG. 15.-Frangois Desportes (1661-1743), Peaches and Silver Platters. Nation- almuseum, Stockholm.

15). Nothing in this space addresses the body in terms of social or creatural solidarity. Insistence on the display of wealth, and an aristocratic privilege, excludes altogether the subject who does not identify with the group whose power is the real matter of the meaningless show. The subject is addressed in terms of pomp and obedience within the ancien regime, nakedly and with unmistakable brutality.

Still life cannot escape the phenomenon of class: the table is an exact barometer of status and wealth. The contemporary viewer ofJan Davidsz. de Heem's Lobster and Fruit knows, in principle or in detail, what degree of affluence it reflects (fig. 16). The viewer is addressed as part of a social and economic order that, in the period of the painting, is the richest on earth.8 What still life can and does attend to is the quality of the social field divided on class lines: its degrees of formality and informality, its openness to the outside or its private hoarding of pleasure and wealth, the aesthetic culture of its appetites, its conflicting impulses of frugality and hedonism, its morality of use and waste, display and nourishment. However specific the class, its management of these factors in the domestic space will be evident even to outsiders: the work by de Heem represents

8. On the financial and moral economy of seventeenth-century Holland, see Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987).


one configuration, the work by Baugin another. The visual subject relates to the scene not only in terms of group exclusion or inclusion, but through a worldly knowledge that knows what it is to interpret the nuanced coding of a material environment. The subject is therefore an actual social agent whose experience of 'humanity' is of a field orchestrated into hierarchies of wealth, status, and aesthetic culture. Even when the image deliberately excludes the viewer, as in the Desportes, he or she is so to speak excluded as part of a group. Which is to say that still life addresses the viewer despite the experience of class and indeed through the experience of class.

The still life of luxury and display proposes a viewing subject who is thus far more at home in the world than the subject addressed by Cotun or Zurbarin. To this extent, the still life of luxury belongs to still

FIG. 16.-Jan Davidsz. de Heem (1606-93), Still Life with Lobster and Fruit. Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio.

life's general movement of 'return', in which the objective field is brought back to a subject who is at home in the world and inhabits it on familiar terms. In class society, social division is, after all, as much part of the subject's ordinary and everyday experience as any of the creaturely and mundane experiences that still life also reflects. By contrast, in Cotin and Zurbarin's works, the intensity of perception seems tied to the refectory and to a negation of worldliness, as though its pressure could be maintained only under artificial conditions: there is a demand on consciousness so strenuous that only the monastery could sustain its pitch. In the less straining vision of Baugin there seems a deliberate effort to tame and


moderate the rigor of that gaze and to bring it within the bounds of civil society. In a sense Baugin's still life points to a certain lack of civility in the mystical still life of Cotin and Zurbarin. Luxury and display bring vision back to a world of actual social relations, and to that extent fulfil still life's mission of 'return', to a subject now constructed not as simply creatural, but as familiar with the whole experience of wealth and rank that belongs to the lived reality of the social world.

The problem is that luxury and display involve a return of the subject to a world that is now to a high degree fragmented and irrealised. Consider, for example, Willem Kalf's Still Life with Nautilus Cup (fig. 17). One still sees all the signs of still life's confidence in the civilising power of the table: the peeled lemon, the glasses, the cutlery, and fruit express still life's most ancient themes, and it would be mean to suppose that the humanity and the civility come to an end simply because the table is wealthy. But the space is beginning to lose its likeness to the earlier space

FIG. 17.-Willem Kalf (1619-93), Stil Life with Nautilus Cup. H. E. Ten Cate Collection, Almelo, Holland.


of still life, the space of the Pompeian xenion and the Gothic larder, of

Cotin and Zurbarin, and even of Baugin (whose display is of taste, perhaps, rather than wealth). The objects on Kalf's table come from a new and greater space, of trade routes and colonies, of maps and discoveries, of investment and capital. It is these that bring to the table the porcelain of China and the carpets of the Near East, and the gems of a millionaire's collection. This mercantilist space, at once geographic and financial, serves to abstract the scene by converting all its contents into units, interchangeable and objectifying, of wealth.

When the themes of luxury appear in still life as emphatically as they do here, and in much of a whole category of Dutch still life of the seventeenth century, there is a transformation of the earlier spatial structure. With the modest Pompeian xenion, with the larders and cupboards of Gothic, and with the frugal tables of Cotin and Zurbaran, the objects are related to domestic action, with all of its humanising and stabilising force. The concepts of display and luxury destroy that stability, since

display exactly breaks or fractures the domestic space and opens it out onto enormous distances: the distances of trade, but also the social distances between individuals and classes precipitated by the kind of massive and

fluctuating economy that is now the scene's real material support. The

display of prosperity inserts a new function of separation of people from

things and from one another, and we find the still life of luxury at a

strange crossroads between the levelling impulse that still life possesses traditionally and perhaps intrinsically, and the impulse of hierarchy and

separation presented by wealth. As still life levels human life and brings it down to its basic encounters with the material world, it describes bonds of familiarity among ourselves, the objects around us, and our fellow creatures; but luxury dissolves that intimate and creaturely environment and casts it into a far larger space, where objects suggest great distance between classes and levels of wealth, and-in the particular case of

Holland-great expansion and abstraction of the economic space as well. This is clear in Kalf's painting, with its carpet and tureen emblematically redolent of both Near and Far East, and the precious shell that lyrically sums up the wealth of the merchants of the sea.

One can think of Chardin's work as criticising the tendency of Cottin or Zurbarfin towards manic attention, and the isolation of the visual subject in a glare of perceptual intensities. One can also think of Chardin as carrying out a massive rescue operation of a genre almost suffocated in seventeenth-century Holland, and in one category of its painting, by a preoccupation with wealth, display, and social division. Chardin's interiors are designed as households, not showcases, and he takes enormous pains to show the house as a real economy run by its members, for themselves. No one has understood so well the humanity of households, or painted more convincingly the harmony that can reign between people and things (figs. 18 and 19). This seems to emerge from the interior itself, which is

FIG. 18.-Chardin, Saying Grace. Mus6e du Louvre, Paris.

FIG. 19.-Chardin, Back from the Market. Mus6e du Louvre, Paris.


suffused with quiet routines, of bringing up children, drawing water, polishing metal, sweeping floors, pressing linen. The people in Chardin's works manage their attention as carefully as they manage the affairs of the house, giving their tasks just the right degree of attention, never too little or too much, as though consciousness were itself measured out as a substance, the real substance of the household. By comparison the interiors of Pieter de Hooch and Gabriel Metsu are managed almost to overefficiency. There, the women of the house enjoy more exalted activ-

ities-correspondence, reading, accomplishments, dramas. These happen within the house, yet in a sense are not part of the house and its man-

agement. In Chardin the management of the house itself is always at the centre. The objects are arranged informally, and not for display. They can be crammed together or moved about as required (figs. 20 and 21). Chardin allows a certain casualness of inattention to loosen his space and give it air. Tasks are not rushed; they succeed one another in a gentle rhythm of cooperation between eye and hand, in a low-plane reality of

quiet duties and small satisfactions. This hush of the Chardin interior, its informality and sense of ease, creates an equilibrium between attention and inattention that makes much of previous still life, both in Spain and in Holland, seem artificially stimulated and out of balance.

FIG. 20.-Chardin, Basket of Wild Strawberries. Private collection, Paris.


FIG. 21.--Chardin, The Pipe. Musee du Louvre, Paris.

By contrast the still lifes of Cotin and Zurbarin seem a kind of

grandiloquence, which seeks to heighten vision at the expense of normal

perceptual order. And the luxury still lifes of seventeenth-century Holland, with their attention to material sumptuousness, possession, and display, seem by contrast almost anticonvivial, however much the table groans. I am not, of course, suggesting that Chardin's art is 'art historical art', or that the critique of earlier still life conventions one can derive from his work was intended as any kind of conscious programme. But looking at Chardin can alert us to what were, in earlier still lifes, real problems for its mode of representation. In the absence of any developed theory of still life painting, Chardin's work can take the place of the criticism that no one seems ever to produce for this genre. Understanding what is emphasised in Chardin can throw light on the contradictions faced by Cotin and Zurbaran, Baugin and Kalf, and perhaps on the logic of still life as a whole.

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