March 13, 1931

Michael Podro, (March 13, 1931 to March 28, 2008) was born to Jewish immigrants, in London. His father was " a noted Judaic scholar who collaborated with Robert Graves on the Nazarene Gospel Restored (1953)." At the time of his son's birth, his father had a press cuttings agency, an interesting and now outmoded occupation. Our information for this post comes from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on our subject.

 Podro read English at Jesus College, Cambridge.  Podro's interest in painting led to a professorship at the University of Essex where his background in art history and the philosophy of art enabled him to make the department a "beacon of philosophically informed art history." According to our source:

[His] students were struck by the sense of urgency he brought to his seminars on Kant's Critique of Judgement, Hegel's Lectures on Fine Art, or Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind. These texts were of more than academic interest to him; he understood them as models of a more fully human way of being in the world, intellectually, bodily, and emotionally."

We read in the same article:

The dissemination of Podro's research was also accomplished through the publication of three books. His first, The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (1972), was an analysis of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosophical and psychological theories of art that later informed the most ambitious art historical writing in German. His next and most important book, The Critical Historians of Art (1982), surveyed the work of those art historians. The book revived interest in the founders of art history as a discipline and demonstrated how philosophical ideas about the nature of beauty, knowledge, and morality could have purchase in writing about art. The overarching aim of the book was to show how a sense of the artist's freedom in constructing a work of art came to be seen as a means of achieving an ethical, inward sense of composure. In this way the role of the work of art became one of overcoming our ordinary relations with the world.

.... In his third and final book, Depiction (1998), Podro wrote about artists who had preoccupied him throughout his career, Donatello, Rembrandt, Chardin, and Hogarth, always attending carefully to the works while also bringing to bear his theoretical concerns. ....

It is this last volume where we notice his discussion of a Chardin work: "Ray," (1728) which features a cat in a kitchen with fish. Podro:

[H]ow feelings are lodged within painting...is something we come to imagine through the painting's complexity. It is a central characteristic of such complexity that we cannot make fully focal what emerges most powerfully....The sense of violence in the subject ...is surely responded to openly in the wit and delicacy of the painting. The painting is in dialogue with its subject, its suggestiveness the product of tact, not repression.

Michael Podro " was a trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1987 to 1996 during a period of some upheaval. .... and appointed CBE in 2001."

November 2, 1699

Our artist today is Jean Simeon Chardin (November 2, 1699 to December 6, 1779) and we read of him:

'Jean Siméon Chardin ... was born in Paris in 1699 and spent his entire life there. Such a parochial existence was unusual for an artist of Chardin's critical, official, and international reputation. His life was essentially uneventful, if such a statement is appropriate to a man who produced some of the greatest works of art in the eighteenth century. He learned what he needed from the old masters he saw in the French royal collection, in the collections of Parisian amateurs, or passing through the active Parisian art market of the day. He might have claimed he did not need to visit Rome or the Netherlands. Like many artists at the time, Chardin was born into the artisan class (his father manufactured billiard tables), which introduced him into the world of luxury goods, professional decorators, and the fine arts. At about the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to the history painter Pierre Jacques Cazes (1676-1754), soon moving to the studio of Noël Nicolas Coypel (1690-1734). But the elevated path of history painting was not for him. About 1720 he painted a large pictorial signboard (destroyed) for the premises of a surgeon, and his first genre scenes on a modest scale, including The Game of Billiards (Paris, Musée Carnavalet). In 1724 he was received into the Académie de Saint Luc, the painters' guild, and in 1728 he exhibited several works, including The Ray of 1725-1726 and The Buffet of 1728 (both Paris, Musée du Louvre) in the annual Exposition de la jeunesse in the Place Dauphine. These works brought him sufficient attention and acclaim that he was that same year received into the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture as a painter "of animals and fruits": the two celebrated still lifes were his reception pieces. He continued to exhibit at the Exposition de la jeunesse until the Académie established regular exhibitions, exclusive to its own members, in 1737. Until about 1733 Chardin's main production was of still life subjects, but in that year he turned seriously to genre scenes, painting the monumental Woman Sealing a Letter (Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg), dated 1733, and the smaller Woman at a Water Cistern (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum), dated 1733 (or possibly 1735). At the Salon of 1737 Chardin exhibited seven small genre scenes, establishing his mastery in this domain and attracting critical acclaim. A staunch supporter and committee member of the Académie, he exhibited still lifes and genre subjects at every Salon until 1779, the year of his death. From 1755 to 1774 he was treasurer of the academy. From 1761 to 1774 he was tapissier of the Salon, meaning that he supervised the installation of the works in the exhibition. In 1738 an engraving was published after one of the genre scenes--Woman Sealing a Letter--which was to become a regular practice, augmenting Chardin's income through the sale of multiple impressions and disseminating his genre imagery far beyond the Paris Salon and the private walls of his collectors. His art, especially his genre paintings, were sought by bourgeois, aristocratic, and royal collectors across Europe, from Paris to Stockholm, from Edinburgh to St. Petersburg, from Vienna to Karlsruhe. Chardin's laborious method of working, but also the success of certain designs, encouraged him to paint more than one and often several versions of many of his genre and still life subjects. The lowly character of his subject matter and his bold, impastoed manner of painting ran counter to the prevalent rococo trend that dominated the Parisian art world in the early part of his career and to the academic classicism that developed during his last two decades. Yet Chardin remained admired and sought after until the end, in spite of a certain disdain expressed by more academically minded critics. Problems with his eyesight in the last few years led him to adopt pastel painting, in which he made brilliant portraits, especially of his wife and himself.'

This portrait is famous. We have a cat utterly unredeemed by human expectations. The canvas has various titles (Still Life with a Cat and a Fish or The Ray) but there is only one cat like this.

December 6, 1779

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (November 2, 1699 to December 6, 1779) was a French painter who set about resolutely doing what he loved, and his attention to reality in his painting has a religious dimension. Among his paintings are several with cats, and typically cats with fish, like a painting entitled "Still-Life with Cat and Fish" which shows a young white and tabby cat adjacent to a fish which has been cut open with a knife, so you have a dramatic mixture of textures.In this picture the cat already has a paw on the fish. In another the cat appears firghtened, though perhaps the expression is some ecstasy of anticipation. The cat may well be the litter-mates, in multiple paintings, white with gray-red parts. In an era when history paintings were held to be the greatest art, the portrayals of the simple, intimate subject matter of Chardin's canvases were so astonishing that he was given a pension by the king, starting in 1752, and later apartments in the Louvre.

Picasso would centuries later salute Chardin with a canvas entitled "Lobster and Cat, (1965).