Chardin and the Oeconomie of Painting

In early modern France, the term “oeconomie” referred to the art of managing material resources, particularly within a household. This lecture considers the oeconomie of Jean-Siméon Chardin’s (1699–1779) artistic practice in relation to the domestic oeconomie represented in his paintings of copper utensils and kitchen scenes. How did the artist think about the layered material construction of the image in relation to the everyday maintenance of surfaces around him? How did his painterly procedures conjure or depart from the alchemy of re-tinning, or the repetitive processes he depicted in later paintings of people scrubbing pots and scraping turnips? This talk will explore, then, the ways in which the figure of the female laborer served not merely as a model or motif for Chardin, but as a possible source of artistic identification. 

These conjectures are grounded in underexamined aspects of Chardin’s career—such as his stint in restoration—and in the present physical condition of his paintings. A recent visit to the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm to view canvases and panels in the conservation lab allows us to shed new light on how Chardin built his paintings, and to better understand how they have changed over time. This paper engages methods of technical art history to articulate meaning harbored in the artist’s famously “mute” pictures.

Image: Jean-Siméon Chardin, The Housekeeper,1747. Oil on canvas, 43 x 36 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Dr Sarah Grandin 

Lecturer in the Arts of Early Modern France 

The Courtauld Institute of Art

Dr Sarah Grandin is Lecturer in the Arts of Early Modern France at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French visual and material culture. Prior to joining the Courtauld, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Clark Art Institute. She served as the Lunde Fellow and as the Clark-Getty Paper Project Curatorial Fellow, in which capacity she co-curated the exhibition Promenades on Paper: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and was co-editor of the accompanying catalogue. Her first monograph, titled To Scale: Manufacturing Grandeur in the Age of Louis XIV, is in preparation. Throughout her research, she investigates the relationship between making and knowing, particularly in the artisanal realm. She has published on drawing, typography, Savonnerie carpets, intaglio prints, and scientific illustration.