Chardin and the Text of Still Life

Author(s): Norman Bryson

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Winter, 1989), pp. 227-252
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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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 fundamentals 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
CriticalInquiry 15 (Winter 1989)
? 1989 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/89/1502-0002$l01.00.

227

All rights reserved.

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 CambridgeNew ArtHistoryand Criticism.
He is the author of Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (1984)
and the editor of Calligram:Essays in New Art Historyfrom 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 exploration 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 overturned 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.

230

Norman Bryson

FIG.1.-Fresco

The Text of Still Life

from Pompeii. First century B.c. Bowl of Fruitand 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 releasesits effect, it inducesa feeling of vertigo
or shock: it is as though we were shown the appearancethe world might
have withouta subjectto perceiveit, the worldminus humanconsciousness,
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 contaminationby something that is uncomfortablyclose to
itself. But trompe l'oeil is closer to still life than to any other genre:
trompe l'oeil rarelyrisksthe human figure, which it too physicallyexpels.
In fact the assumptions of trompe l'oeil to some extent inhabit still life
even when there is no question of being actuallyduped 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 cabbagelack the weight
known to the hand. Their weightlessnessmockssuch intimateknowledge:
2. The vertiginousaspectsof still life are exploredbyJean Baudrillard,'The Trompe-

l'Oeil', in Calligram:Essays in New Art Historyfrom France, ed. Norman Bryson (Cambridge,

1988), pp. 27-52.

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FIG.4.- Mosaic.SecondcenturyA.D.ScrapsofaMeal.MuseoLaterano,
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FIG.5.-Wallerand Vaillant(1623-77), Trompe

l'oeil with Letters. Gemaldgalerie, Dresden.

Critical Inquiry

Winter 1989

233

FIG.6.-Juan Sinchez Cotin (1561-1627), Quince,Cabbage,

MelonandCucumber.
Fine Arts Gallery,San Diego.

it obliteratesthe body's sense of gravity,and of scale. Painting normally

diminishes things and reduces even the colossal to manageablesize, 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 scalelessnessis that of the universeconceivedwithout
regard to the observer and the measure taken from the self (Man, the
measure of all things). The observeris 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 subjectis a variationon this: the
subject who looks out at the scene of still life is made to feel no bond of
continuous life with the objectsthat fill the scene. It proposesand assumes
a viewing subject who looks at things withoutfrom a field withinthe self,
and experiences disconnection.Stilllife assumesa positionvis-A-visthings
in which 'self' and 'things' remain fundamentally separated from each
other. The individual viewer is presented as an island of consciousness
lookingout acrossa sea of objectifiedmatter,as thoughthe livingconnection
between the human self and the world of things had been broken. Hence

234

Norman Bryson

The Text of Still Life

the mortein naturemorte:there is no living bond between the watcher

subjectand the objectifiedfield (figs. 7 and 8). Living creaturesare killed
before this gaze-perhaps only the insectscan surviveit. 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 powerto immobilise,

to petrifyappearances,
andtoobjectify
everything
in the visualfieldbelongsto the gazeof stilllife, whichpolarisessubject
and object.The universeinhabitedby that gaze is quite naturallya
universeof death.On the one hand,the gazeof stilllife establishesthe
subjectas a realitythatis beyondalldoubtandthatoccupiesthe position
of centrewith regardto everythingelse outsideit. On the other hand,
the thingsof the worldappearas havingno livingbondwiththiswatchful
subjectlockedup insidethe self: thingsentera coldand alienrealmof
death. Such killingobjectification
comes, in trompel'oeil, to threaten
eventhesubject,who looksat the worldas thoughfroma standpointof
personalannihilation.It is no accidentthat in Dutch still life of the
seventeenthcentury,the death'shead can featureat the centreof the
scene.Thisis morethanan iconographicnod in the directionof 'Vanity'.
Stilllife'svisionconceivesof objectivityas the negationof whatlivesand
breathes.Its illusionismpushesthe worldfurtherandfurtherawayfrom
the subject,and as this happensthe worldcomesto appearas so much
rawmaterial,underthe authorityof the humansubjectand servingits
everyneed, or appetite;butthe worldcanappearalsoas cold,inhuman,
and fundamentallyinhospitableto this masteringsubject.The duality
betweensubjectandobjectis somethingstilllifeexplores
andcontradiction
limit.
to its outer
These three assaultson the humansubjectgive to still life whatis
themostchilling,deadly,lethalkindof visiononemayencounter
potentially

FIG.7.-Balthasar vander Ast (1593or 1594-1657), Shells.Museum

Boymans-VanBeuinngen, Rotterdam.

CriticalInquiry

Winter1989

235

FIG.8.-Giovanni BattistaRecco(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 narrativevalue. Its illusionismimplies 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 subjertwho looks and the world that is seen.
To sum up these remarksso far: still life makesa 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 certainlythe genre
where visual objectification and subject-objectdualism are carried to
extremes; but at the same time it redefines the relationsbetween 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-abrac 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,remainunalteredover greatspansof time.The frescoesat Pompeii
and Herculaneum showing such things as lobsters, birds, and vases are
3. On the issue of castrationin the visual field, see Le SiminairedeJacquesLacan,livre
de la psychanalyse
XI, lesquatreconcepts
(Paris, 1973), sections6-9; trans.Alan
fondamentaux
ed. Jacques-Alain
Sheridan,under the title TheFourFundamental
ofPsycho-Analysis,
Concepts
Miller (New York, 1978), pp. 67-119.

236

Norman Bryson

The Text of Still Life

FIG.9.-Fresco from Herculaneum. First century A.D.Shells,

Lobster,Vase and Bird. Museo Nazionale, Naples.

in some sense continuouswith the stilllife of seventeenth-centuryHolland

(fig. 9). The peaches and the glassjar half filled with water at Pompeii
is not fundamentally different from the work of Cotin or Franciscode
Zurbarin (fig. 10). The forms of such things asjars, plates,baskets,bowls,
glasses point backwardsto 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 recommend themselves as appropriate,where 'propriety'is notjust a matter
of bare function but of a whole network of practicalactivity, 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 valleysfrom 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

Critical Inquiry

Winter 1989

237

countless acts of attention across countless generations, time secretes a

pricelessproduct:familiarity.The forms of the artefactsdistiland stabilise
human usage. They create an abidingworldwhere the subjectis 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 securityof
any kind of home ground. The forms of the things in still life compress
and stabilisethe loose pluralityof 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 dissociatedand severed. Still life also addressesthe
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 solidaritywith 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
everythingelse in order to sustainlife. And the nourishmentis also social:

FIG. 10.--Fresco from Pompeii. First Century. Peachesand GlassJar. Museo

Nazionale, Naples.

238

Norman Bryson

The Text of Still Life

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

CriticalInquiry

Winter 1989

239

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
and
have
the
been hung on string. But precisely because
cabbage
quince
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 transubstantiation (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', Gazettedes
Beaux-Arts 30 (Oct.-Dec. 1946): 279.

FIG. 11.-Francisco

de Zurbarain (1598-1664),

Lemons, Oranges,and Rose. The Norto

Critical Inquiry

Winter 1989

241

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, management 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. Defamiliarising 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 Dessertwith 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).

242

Norman Bryson

FIG. 12.-Lubin

Paris.

The Text of Still Life

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

(figs. 13 and 14). He shows no signs of wanting to tighten up the loose

world of the interiorshe presents. On the contrary,his own intervention
is unassuming, and seems so ordinary as to relaxrather than heighten
attention.7This 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 Dessertwith Wafers,for example, is
calculatedwithimmenseand evidentpains.But Chardinavoidscomposition
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 exactlythe waythe scene welcomesthe viewerin 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 evennessof regardas it moveswithequalinterestand equalengagement
across the visual field. Chardinundoes the hierarchybetween zones that
7. See MichaelBaxandall'sexcellent discussionof the problemof focus in Chardin's
work, in Patterns of Intention:An HistoricalExplanation of Pictures (New Haven, Conn., 1985),

pp. 74-104.

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243

FIG.13.-Jean-Baptiste-SimeonChardin(1699-1779), TheCutMelon.Privatecollection,
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 towardsblur-perhaps
Chardin'sgreatest formal innovation-as though he were trying to paint
peripheralas well as centralvision, 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 vigilantlywatched.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.

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NormanBryson

The Textof Still Life

FIG. 14.-Chardin, Jar of Apricots.Toronto, Art Galleryof 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, stilllife addressesthe subjectin directand creatural
terms, as entitled to human hospitalityand 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 intimatelyknows,
human solidarityis broken at every point by class. It is only at an ideal
level that human 'warmth'and 'nourishment' appear. In practice, the
subjectexists as a member of a stratifiedsociety.From countless possible
examples, take the Peachesand SilverPlattersof FrancoisDesportes (fig.

Critical Inquiry

FIG. 15.-Frangois

Desportes (1661-1743),

Winter 1989

245

Peaches and Silver Platters. Nation-

almuseum, Stockholm.

15). Nothing in this space addressesthe body in termsof socialor creatural

solidarity.Insistenceon the displayof wealth,and an aristocraticprivilege,
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 unmistakablebrutality.
Still life cannot escape the phenomenon of class:the table is an exact
barometerof statusand wealth.The contemporaryviewerofJan Davidsz.
de Heem's Lobsterand Fruit knows, in principle or in detail, what degree
of affluence it reflects (fig. 16). The viewer is addressedas 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.
Howeverspecificthe class,its managementof these factorsin the domestic
space will be evident even to outsiders:the work by de Heem represents
8. On the financialand moral economy of seventeenth-centuryHolland, see Simon
Schama, The Embarrassmentof Riches:An Interpretationof Dutch Culturein the GoldenAge (New

York, 1987).

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The Text of Still Life

one configuration,the workby Baugin another. The visualsubjectrelates

to the scene not only in termsof group exclusionor inclusion,but through
a worldlyknowledgethat knowswhat it is to interpretthe nuancedcoding
of a materialenvironment. The subjectis therefore an actual socialagent
whose experience of 'humanity'is of a field orchestratedinto hierarchies
of wealth, status,and aestheticculture. 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 classand indeed throughthe 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

andFruit.Museum
FIG.16.-Jan Davidsz.de Heem (1606-93), StillLifewithLobster
of Art, Toledo, Ohio.

life's general movement of 'return',in which the objectivefield is brought

back to a subject who is at home in the world and inhabitsit on familiar
terms. In class society, social division is, after all, as much part of the
subject'sordinary and everyday experience as any of the creaturelyand
mundane experiences that still life also reflects. By contrast, in Cotin
and Zurbarin'sworks,the intensityof perceptionseemstied to the refectory
and to a negationof worldliness,as though its pressurecouldbe maintained
only under artificialconditions: 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

CriticalInquiry

Winter1989

247

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 civilityin
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 constructednot 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 problemis that luxuryand displayinvolvea returnof the subject
to a worldthatis now to a high degree fragmentedand irrealised.Consider,
for example, Willem Kalf's StillLifewithNautilusCup(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 likenessto the earlierspace

FIG. 17.-Willem Kalf (1619-93), Stil LifewithNautilusCup. H. E.

Ten Cate Collection,Almelo, Holland.

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The Text of Still Life

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, SayingGrace.Mus6e du Louvre, Paris.

FIG. 19.-Chardin,

Backfrom the Market. Mus6e du Louvre, Paris.

Critical Inquiry

Winter 1989

251

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

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FIG.21.--Chardin, ThePipe. 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.