The Revival of Chardin in French Still-Life Painting, 1850-1870

In 1852 the Journal pour rire published a caricature (Fig. 1) by Nadar of François Bonvin seated, as it were, in one of the still lifes he exhibited at the Salon of that year. The drawing suggests the reception given Bonvin's pictures of kitchen utensils, a rare subject in French salons. Reflected in the varnished surface of the painting, one viewer inspects it dubiously, another with more open disapproval. Nadar, graphically anticipating Cézanne's famous remark on Monet, has made Bonvin "almost only an eye," for still-life painters, it was generally believed, were only copyists of whatever was set before them.