Chardin And Rembrandt

Chardin and Rembrandt is an unfinished essay written around 1895 by Marcel Proust. Oft overlooked in Prousts illustrious writing career, this book is a newly translated version by David Zwirner Books as one of the first two entries in its ekphrasis series. This essay is a literary experiment in which an unnamed narrator gives advice to a young man suffering from melancholy, taking him on an imaginary tour through the Louvre where his readings of Chardin imbue the everyday world with new meaning, and his ruminations on Rembrandt take his melancholic pupil beyond the realm of mere objects.

Excerpt from Chardin Owing to the difficulty experienced in trying to provide a large number of illustrations, which after all it has not been possible to obtain, this book has been in the press rather longer than expected. Reading it over now, I feel that its attitude to modern art, more particularly towards Whistler and the Academy - now a topic devoid of actuality it seems - needs perhaps some definition. The new manner of seeing exemplified, amongst others, by Whistler, has relieved the modern artist of a great deal of grinding labour; he produces his illusions with considerable effect and inconsiderable effort. Whistler's Protests in Pigment have been the cause of a great deal of slipshod workmanship, because the mental labour which preceded each stroke of Whistler's brush is not so apparent as the patient toil of Van Eyck's pencil, for instance. We have now all over Europe a host of painters, who, pleased with their ability to produce effects, seem to think that that is due to their exceptional abilities. That, however, is a great fallacy. Careful scrutiny of seventy-five out of a hundred 'modern' painters' work will reveal less knowledge of the painter's craft than some of the most discredited of the early and mid-Victorian painters possessed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attention to ordinary life. But two hundred years before the rise of literary realism, Dutch painters had already made an art of the everyday--pictures that served as a compelling model for the novelists who followed. By the mid-1800s, seventeenth-century Dutch painting figured virtually everywhere in the British and French fiction we esteem today as the vanguard of realism. Why were such writers drawn to this art of two centuries before? What does this tell us about the nature of realism? In this beautifully illustrated and elegantly written book, Ruth Yeazell explores the nineteenth century's fascination with Dutch painting, as well as its doubts about an art that had long challenged traditional values. After showing how persistent tensions between high theory and low genre shaped criticism of novels and pictures alike, Art of the Everyday turns to four major novelists--Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust--who strongly identified their work with Dutch painting. For all these writers, Dutch art provided a model for training themselves to look closely at the particulars of middle-class life. Yet even as nineteenth-century novelists strove to create illusions of the real by modeling their narratives on Dutch pictures, Yeazell argues, they chafed at the model. A concluding chapter on Proust explains why the nineteenth century associated such realism with the past and shows how the rediscovery of Vermeer helped resolve the longstanding conflict between humble details and the aspirations of high art.

This book describes the development of Proust's treatment of material objects from his earliest work Les Plaisirs et les jours to his mature novel À la recherche du temps perdu. It examines the literary influences on Proust's way with objects in the light of certain critical texts and reconsiders the significance of Ruskin. As the movement from unreflective and spontaneous representation to a meta-narrative of consciousness is traced, some questions as to the banality of the 'banal object' arise. The meta-narrative finds resonance in a peculiarly Proustian pictoriality which has been largely unnoticed. It resides in descriptions where objects appear simultaneously or at different times as things in paintings and in the real. By exploring connections between Proust's pictoriality and his reflections on 'matière' and 'surface', the author suggests a radical approach to the modernism of À la recherche du temps perdu.

Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779) is acknowledged as one of the finest genre and still-life painters of the eighteenth century. Until now, there has been surprisingly little substantial scholarship published on this great French artist's work. This authoritative and beautiful book redresses that lack, bringing to light a wealth of new material about an important and seminal artist, including paintings discovered within the last decade. A man of humble origins who painted humble subjects, Chardin rose to become one of the most sought-after artists of his day, attracting the patronage of Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, and the Queen of Sweden, among others. The outstanding colorplates in Chardin clearly demonstrate why his work was so popular, and why it still intrigues us today. They reveal the artist's extraordinary understanding of form and volume, his virtuosity in depicting surface textures, and above all his poetic, yet unsentimental feeling for the common objects of daily life. Chardin's unassuming kitchen-table vignettes were enormously influential on the history of painting in France, where they have been revered for two centuries. They touch us with their calmness and humanity: a young boy building a house of cards; a woman taking tea, interiors with fruit, game, and lustrous copper pans. They are more than just depictions of domestic contentment; Chardin's paintings convey values that transcend his time and bring the artist and the modern observer together. An illustrated catalogue of prints made after Chardin's paintings accompanies a fascinating analysis of Chardin's life and career by Marianne Roland Michel, Director of the noted Galerie Cailleux in Parisand a highly regarded authority on French eighteenth-century painting and drawing. Together with contemporary accounts by Denis Diderot and Charles-Nicholas Cochin, a fully rounded picture emerges of the artist's life, his critical reception, the artistic world of his time, and his works themselves, which alone are proof of his unique standing. This lavish work is an invaluable contribution to the literature on Chardin and eighteenth-century art.