Taking Tea With Boucher and Chardin
by Zoe Strimpel
Sun, 15 Jun 2008 at 4:41 PM
The Wallace Collection, London's prettiest, most avowedly Francophile gallery, has cut right through the blockbuster art season with a quiet jewel of an exhibition: "Boucher and Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners," in conjunction with Glasgow's Hunterian Museum. The key works in the show are Boucher's "A Lady on Her Day Bed" (1743, lent by the Frick Collection) and Chardin's less-well-known "Lady Taking Tea" (1735). It is an intense, concentrated spotlight on the early days of genre painting, a style pioneered by Dutch artists that focuses on scenes in everyday life.
What is interesting here is not so much the everyday-life element, but the feminine element, and the fact that these ladies are depicted on their own, with a sort of anecdotal, confidential aspect. Boucher's lady looks intriguingly at us from the intimacy of her daybed; Chardin's is alone in simple surroundings with a pot of tea.
The idea of "manners" had recently been pinned to the rise of the tea-drinking ceremony, the new, elegant (and less demanding) alternative to lunch or supper. The 18th century saw countless books on how to make, drink, and hold parties around the brew in style. It was also something that women could prepare and enjoy toute seule without the seediness or louche associations of alcohol.
Boucher's madame is not actually drinking tea, though no doubt she has done so recently or is soon to do so. She has a performative expression; she's all guile and je ne sais quoi. The objects in her room are almost as important as she is; Boucher was never one to skimp on depicting luxurious consumables.
The exhibition's curators seemed to prefer the Chardin. There are slight problems with perspective in the picture — the lady's chairback is unrealistically far away, her teapot is also out — but it is tender and reflective and, for this reason (and because of the timing of Madame Chardin's death in 1735), thought to be of the artist's wife. Unlike Boucher's lady on her daybed, who is just decadently and vapidly enjoying her fashionable setup (to be fair, there is a healthy dose of irony in her expression as she looks at the artist), Chardin's lady seems almost oblivious to the whole idea of "manners." She's writing and thinking, unobserved. There's an irony in that, too, of course.
Some Hogarth paintings of concomitant tea-taking scenes in England and some fascinating artifacts of the period's relationship with the brew are a nice touch.
The Wallace's curator, Christoph Vogtherr, concedes the show might not be crammed with people day in and day out because pre-modern can be difficult to sell (though a Hogarth exhibition at the Tate last year was impossible to get into), but he reckons there's a healthy and constant demand for our painterly European founding fathers. Perfectly justified, too.
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