The Prayer before Meal {The Story of Art}

The Prayer Before Meal. Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin. 1740.

“In the eighteenth century, English institutions and English taste became the admired models for all people in Europe who longed for the rule of reason. For in England art had not been used to enhance the power and glory of god-like rulers… [The] aristocratic dream-world began to recede. Painters began to look at the life of the ordinary men and women of their time to draw moving or amusing episodes which could be spun out into a story. The greatest of these was Jean Siméon Chardin… [The Prayer before Meal is] one of his charming paintings—a simple room with a woman setting dinner on the table and asking two children to say grace. Chardin liked these quiet glimpses of the life of ordinary people… [H]e feels and preserves the poetry of a domestic scene, without looking for striking effects or pointed allusions. Even his color is calm and restrained… [I]f we study them in the original, we soon discover in them an unobtrusive mastery in the subtle gradation of tones and the seemingly artless arrangement of the scene that makes him one of the most lovable painters of the eighteenth century.”

Ernst H. Gombrich, “Chapter 23: The Age of Reason,” The Story of Art, 15th edition