Chardin was born in a poor quarter of the neighborhood of the rue de Seine, Paris. his father reluctantly pemitted him to take up art in the studio of the academician, Casus, a teacher of repute. His paintings had an immediate popular appeal, and upon their first exhibition at the Academy elicited the praise form critics that "a new master has arisen who rivals the Duch painters". Chardin was unanimously elected to the Academy, with the special consideration, in recognition of his poverty, of having his entrance fees reduced.

What the painters, Watteau, Nattier, Boucher, Fragonard, did in commemoration of the court life of their century, Chardin did for the life of that lower class which was its undercurrent. Virtually in that station into which he had been born, he  lived and worked and died. In his still-lifes he has imbued the simplest and most homely objects with arresting dignity, endowing them with a warmth that was of his own kindly, generous, and simple nature. Portraits, his still-lifes might be called, of people.

And in his genre pictures he has granted to the humble people of his own class a greater dignity than to the great of France their own appointed painters would concede. And on what Chardin saw - and felt- on what Chardin himself through the simple integrity of his own nature was - the final happiness of social man depends.

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