Jean‐Siméon Chardin 1699–1779
NG 4077 
The Young Schoolmistress

Humphrey Wine, 2018

Extracted from:

Humphrey Wine, The Eighteenth Century French Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2018).
Humphrey Wine and Virginia Napoleone, Former Owners of the Eighteenth‐Century French Paintings in the National Gallery: Appendix to ‘The National Gallery Catalogues: The Eighteenth‐Century French Paintings’ (London: National Gallery Company, 2018).

c. 1737

Oil on canvas, 61.6 × 66.5 cm

Signed at the right: chardin

Provenance

Probably acquired by James Stuart (1775–1849) of Dunearn, Fife and finally of 4 Boyne Terrace, Notting Hill, in or after 1831; in his posthumous sale, Christie & Manson, London, 19 April 1850 (no. 185, ‘Chardin … A girl teaching a child to read – very elegant’, £10 to Fuller);¹ John Webb; his daughter, Edith Cragg (died 1925), by whom bequeathed in 1925 as part of the John Webb Bequest. See the entries for James Stuart of Dunearn, and for John Webb and Edith Cragg, in the Appendix to this volume on the NG website.²

Exhibitions

Paris Salon 1740 ? (62: ‘la petite Maîtresse d’École’); London, National Gallery, April 1943 Picture of the Month ;³ London 1968 (137); London 1978b (11); Paris, Cleveland and Boston 1979 (70); London 1986, p. 29; London 1987a, pl. 21; Belfast, Ipswich and Bath 2001–2; Ottawa, Washington and Berlin 2003–4 (40); Ferrara and Madrid 2010–11 (47).⁴

Related Works

Paintings: Versions or Copies

• (1) The Young Schoolmistress, oil on canvas, 62 × 73 cm (Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, Hugh Lane Bequest, 1918) (fig. 1). The status of this and the following painting is discussed in the text.
• (2) The Young Schoolmistress, oil on canvas, 58.3 × 74 cm (Washington, National Gallery of Art) (fig. 2). A similar size painting, described as ‘une jeune fille faisant lire un enfant’, on canvas and 21 × 27 pouces (that is 56.6 × 73.1 cm), was part of lot 81, Chariot, Paris, 22 April 1776 and following, sold for 314 livres.⁵
• (3) Probably destroyed during the Second World War, formerly in the collection of Henri de Rothschild, oil on wood (?), 25 × 20 cm. The composition was in vertical format and in reverse to that of NG 4077. A copy, to judge from the photograph in Dayot and Vaillat 1908.⁶

The following is a list of the numerous versions of Chardin’s composition, some autograph and some the same picture reappearing, which have passed through the salerooms.

• (4) Sale of Rohan‐Chabot, Wâtelet etc., Paillet, Paris, 23 May 1780 and following, lot 26 (‘deux Tableaux … l’un représente un jeune garçon qui fait des boules de savon. L’autre est une jeune fille qui montre à lire à un enfant. Sur toile, hauteur 21 pouces & demi. Largeur 27.’), 58.2 × 73.1 cm. Given the similarity of their descriptions and measurements, these are probably the paintings in the 1776 Baché, Brillant, de Cossé and Quené sale, Paris, 22 April 1776 and following, lot 81.
• (5) Sale of Claude‐Henri Wâtelet, Hayot de Longpré, Paris, 12 June 1786 and following, lot 10, 200 livres to Desnon (‘Deux Tableaux pendans, l’un représente un jeune garçon faisant des boules de savon, l’autre une femme occupée à faire lire un enfant … sur toile, hauteur 24 pouces, largeur 30 pouces’), 65 × 81.2 cm.
• (6) Sale of Antoine‐Charles Dulac et al., Paillet, Paris, 6 April 1801 and following, lot 19 (‘Deux tableaux … l’un représente un écolier qui fait des bules [sic] de savon; l’autre, une jeune fille qui fait lire un enfant’). No measurements are given in the sale catalogue.
• (7) Didot de Saint Marc sale, Bonnefons, Paris, 28 December 1819 and following, lot 25, 15 francs to De Sommerard. Described as from the collection of Mme Geoffrin. Also on canvas and in vertical format, 20 × 17 pouces (mesures usuelles), that is, 55.55 × 47.21 cm.⁷
• (8) Magnan de la Roquette posthumous sale, Bonnefons de [page 96][page 97]Lavialle, Paris, 22 November–1 December 1841, lot 116, 205 francs. No size is given but the lot description includes the words ‘Ce délicieux petit tableau est accompagné de la gravure par Lépicié’.

  

  

  

• (9) Aguado, marquis de Las Marismas posthumous sale, Bonnefons de Lavialle & Renou, Paris, 18–22 April 1843, lot 7, described only as ‘Chardin – La maîtresse d’école’.
• (10) Anonymous sale, Bonnefons de Lavialle, Paris, 5–6 March 1852, lot 29, described as ‘La Maîtresse d’école, grisaille’. The sale catalogue notes that the attributions in it are those under which the seller acquired the works.
• (11) Devere sale, Pouchet (Ferdinand Laneuville, expert), Paris, 17 March 1855, lot 8, as by Chardin, ‘La Maîtresse d’école. Sujet gravé’, 1,525 francs. It was this picture that was noted by the Goncourt brothers.⁸
• (12) Signol posthumous sale, Ch. Pillet, Paris, 1 April 1878, lot 44, as attributed to Chardin, ‘La leçon de lecture. Une fillette vue à mi‐corps et vêtue d’une robe bleue, donne à son jeune frère les premières leçons… / Gracieuse composition qui a été gravée… / Toile. Haut., 57 cent.; larg., 63 cent.’, 115 francs.
• (13) Ph. Sichel posthumous sale, Chevallier & Duchesne, Paris, 22 June 1899, lot 8, 250 francs, there described as attributed to Chardin, oil on canvas, 23 × 27 cm.
• (14) Mme H. sale, Paris, 30 April 1926, lot 26, 760 francs, 22 × 26 cm. Possibly the same painting as (13) above.
• (15) A copy of the painting once in the Henri de Rothschild collection (see (3) above) was sold at Toulouse, Groupe Gersaint, 7 November 1998, oil on canvas, 46 × 38 cm.
• (16) A copy in reverse was sold at Stockholm, Stockholms Auktionsverk, 22 May 2001, lot 1439, 18,000 SEK. Oil on canvas, 22.8 × 27.94 cm. Its size suggests that this may be the same painting as (13) and/or (14) above.

Engravings

• (1) In reverse by François‐Bernard Lépicié père (fig. 3) (of which an example of the second state is in the Bibliothèque nationale),⁹ dated 1740, published by L. Surugue, Paris 1740, and entitled La Maitresse d’Ecole (in three states, according to Bocher).¹⁰ Etching and engraving. Exhibited at the 1740 Salon;¹¹ announced in the Mercure de France, October 1740, p. 2178. Lépicié added the following verses below the title:
  Si cet aimable enfant, rend bien d’une Maitresse
  L’air serieux, le dehors imposans,
  Ne peut on pas penser que la feinte et l’adresse
  Viennent au Sexe, au plus‐tard en naissans
• (2) Simon Duflos, mentioned as in Paris in 1752 according to Bocher, made an engraving.¹² A hand‐coloured example entitled The Young Schoolmistress is in the Musée national de l’Education, Rouen (inv. 1979.7103.1) and there dated about 1750 (fig. 4). It reverses Lépicié’s print and is probably after it.
• (3) A variant composition in vertical format published by Robert Sayer, 53 Fleet Street, London, 15 March 1787, entitled School Mistress and Scholar and lettered below the image ‘A Pleasing task, to teach the Young Ideas how to shool [sic]’. Christopher Lennox‐Boyd has suggested that Sayer may [page 98]not have been the first publisher of this print, but that there might have been an intermediary state, since it is the sort of image that might have been issued or reissued when Bennett managed the business between 1774 and 1785.¹³

  

  

• (4) An engraving (on wood according to Bocher) by Gauchard after a drawing by Hadamard appeared in Le Magasin pittoresque, 29 December 1861, p. 408. It is in the same direction as NG 4077 and accompanied an anonymous text entitled ‘La Soeur Ainée’.¹⁴
• (5) For Lucien Lucian Freud’s etching in reverse, see Andrew Lambirth in Morphet 2000, ill. p. 132.

Technical Notes

The condition is good apart from a vertical damage about 10 cm long to the right of the younger child’s head, some minor losses elsewhere, and numerous retouchings along the top. The ground is pale brown in colour. A visible pentimento to the contour of the older girl’s back shows in the X‐radiograph (fig. 5), which suggests that her head may once have been painted some 2 cm to the right. Examination with infrared reflectography also suggests that the position of her head, and indeed that of the younger child, may have changed; that there were slight changes to the contour of her back and to the position of his proper right hand; and that her eye socket was underpainted with darker paint. There is also a minor pentiment to the proper right shoulder of the younger child.

The canvas, which was lined at some date prior to its acquisition,¹⁵ is a quite fine plain weave. Its cusping is marked along the right‐hand edge and along the bottom, but this is less pronounced along the left. What appears to be an addition of some 2 cm along the top edge is in fact part of the original canvas, reclaimed from having been turned over on an earlier, smaller stretcher. The stamp of ‘F. Leedham, Liner’ on the back of the stretcher shows an earlier lining to have occurred between the 1830s, when Francis Leedham started working in Soho, London, and 1857, when his business was taken over by George Morrill.¹⁶ The current lining was applied in 1972, when NG 4077 was last restored. The stretcher is marked in pencil along the top bar ‘15 D 5’.

Other Versions and Dating

In his catalogue of Washington’s French paintings Philip Conisbee forcefully argued for the inclusion of Washington’s version of The Young Schoolmistress (fig. 2) among Chardin’s autograph works.¹⁷ Consequently, and thanks to Pierre Rosenberg, who curated the 2011 Chardin exhibition at the Prado, and to the lending museums, the opportunity was taken to hang Washington’s picture close to both NG 4077 and the Dublin picture (fig. 1).¹⁸ It thus became apparent that whereas NG 4077 and the Dublin picture were autograph, the Washington picture was not¹⁹ – for the present author on account of its tonality and facture and the ‘prettification’ of the young child’s features. Conisbee also discussed the question of whether it was the London picture or the Dublin picture that was shown at the 1740 Salon, and rightly argued that the superior state of conservation of the former was not of itself evidence that it was the Salon picture. He tended towards the Dublin picture as having figured in 1740 for two reasons. Firstly, unlike the Dublin picture, NG 4077 shows less of the image than is shown in Lépicié’s print, whereas Lépicié’s prints are habitually faithful reproductions of Chardin’s paintings. Secondly, ‘the London canvas exhibits many fewer pentimenti than the Dublin picture, which retains clear traces of the artist’s careful adjustments to the positioning of the figures’.²⁰ The London painting may have been marginally trimmed down the left‐hand side, which might account for it showing less of the image, but that does not apply to the bottom and right‐hand edges (see Technical Notes). It is therefore correct that NG 4077 shows less of the girl’s dress and of the night table than is shown in the print. However, the Dublin picture (and, for that matter, the [page 99]Washington picture) does not itself entirely correspond to the print, being curtailed along the bottom edge. Possibly the Dublin picture was reduced along its bottom edge. However, in that case its proportions would no longer correspond to those of Lépicié’s print. Either way, the correspondence between the Dublin picture and the print is scarcely better than that between the print and NG 4077.²¹ It is not therefore the case that the Dublin picture exhibits the print’s compositional entirety²² and no conclusion can be drawn from the relative correspondence of the two pictures with the print. It has been suggested that Lépicié was reproducing NG 4077 but chose to extend the composition, perhaps in order to create an image that better matched its ‘pendant print’, namely Lépicié’s print after NG 4078.²³ However, this explanation seems unlikely given that Lépicié’s print after NG 4077 preceded the other by three years, and in any event it is no more likely that the prints any more than the paintings were pendants (see below).

Regarding the number and importance of the pentimenti in the Dublin and London paintings, Conisbee was unaware of the results of the X‐radiograph of NG 4077 (see Technical Notes), which indicate that it, too, was altered during the course of its execution.²⁴ Given that this and the Dublin picture both show pentimenti, and that neither precisely corresponds to the print, is it possible that both were works in progress, so to speak, towards a third, now lost, composition, of which the print is evidence and which was the picture exhibited at the 1740 Salon? A parallel case is that of the hypothetical fourth lost version of Soap Bubbles, supposed by Conisbee to account for the fact that none of the three known autograph versions of that composition precisely corresponds to Filloeul’s print.²⁵ A detail in Lépicié’s print not discussed in earlier accounts of the London, Dublin or Washington pictures, and which is at least consistent with the theory of a third now lost composition, is the fact that, unlike in the London or Dublin paintings, the page from which the child is reading has decipherable letters on it.²⁶ Its condition renders it impossible to make out any such letters in the Dublin picture. The London picture has indecipherable marks on the page, the number and spacing of which, however, correspond to those on the print.²⁷ But there may well be other reasons (see below) for Lépicié having added letters. Pending other supporting evidence, a hypothetical lost third version should for now be placed in abeyance; it is better to assume that Lépicié simply chose to extend the image.

In his discussion of the Washington picture, Conisbee, who was rightly cautious in identifying any one of the versions of The Young Schoolmistress with the Salon exhibit, wrote that ‘the year of exhibition of a prime version does not necessarily give us anything more than a terminus post quem for subsequent repetitions…’. This would imply that NG 4077, if it was not the Salon picture, was executed later than 1740. However, as Martin Kemp has pointed out, Chardin’s compositions were sometimes exhibited several years after their execution.²⁸ Rosenberg suggested 1736 for NG 4077,²⁹ and Marianne Roland Michel 1738–9,³⁰ while Conisbee proposed around 1740.³¹ There are similarities between NG 4077 and the Louvre version of The Young Draughtsman (fig. 6) in the facture, especially in the modelling of the hands, the painting of the background, the sinuous profile of the figures’ backs, and the relationship of the figures and the accessory furniture to the picture plane. The Louvre painting is signed and dated 1737, and while it can be sometimes misleading to assume that stylistically similar paintings by an artist are necessarily chronologically close, on that basis and in the absence of contrary evidence a date around 1737 is here proposed for NG 4077. Such contrary evidence might, for example, be that NG 4077 was the conceptual pair to NG 4078, which was exhibited at the 1741 Salon, but for the reasons given below, such a pairing is unlikely.

Subject Matter

A girl of about 12 or 13 is teaching a younger child.³² She wears a type of indoor (linen?) nightcap with a close‐fitting crown and decorated with a ribbon, popular from the 1730s to the 1780s and known as a dormeuse, and a scarf and pinafore over her dress.³³ Her hair has been tightly curled in a style known as tête de mouton, which had been adopted in France from the 1720s.³⁴ The sex of the younger child is unclear, although it is probably male, and was so assumed, for example, in Le Magasin pittoresque in 1861.³⁵ A similar protective headdress, called a bourlet, is worn by two identifiably male children in other works by Chardin: that in his destroyed Un petit enfant avec des attributs de l’enfance (now known through Charles‐Nicolas Cochin’s engraving of 1738), in which the child is clearly male, as evidenced by his toy drum and the fact that the portrait’s assumed pendant [page 100]was a Petite fille assise, s’amusant avec son déjeuner;³⁶ and the seated child in Le Bénédicité, who also has a toy drum hanging over the back of his chair³⁷ and who was identified as the ‘petit frère’ in the verses appended to Lépicié’s print after the painting of 1744. On the other hand, the toys of the seated child in Boucher’s Le Déjeuner of 1739 (Paris, Louvre; oil on canvas, 81.5 × 65.5 cm), who like the child in NG 4077 wears a bourlet, are a female doll as well as a toy horse, and for many years that child was assumed to be Boucher’s own four‐year‐old daughter.³⁸

The figures stand at a night table, a piece of bedroom furniture with a compartment that might house a chamber‐pot, although, unlike the table illustrated in the Encyclopédie , the compartment is here shown closed by double doors rather than open and it may also have been constructed from mahogany rather than walnut.³⁹ It has been suggested that the tray top, the diamond‐shaped inlaid keyhole escutcheons and the probable use of mahogany point to the night table (which is not among the items recorded in the November 1737 inventory of Chardin’s household effects)⁴⁰ having been made in England.⁴¹ The unadorned nature of the item locates the action within the domestic sphere of a bourgeois household.

Although it is impossible to make out what is written on the pages being studied by the child (either here or in the Dublin or Washington pictures), Lépicié’s print clearly shows the marks as letters, so indicating a reading lesson. This would be consistent with eighteenth‐century pedagogic practice as advocated by Jean‐Baptiste de La Salle in his widely used and frequently republished Conduite des écoles chrétiennes divisée en deux parties (1717). This proposed that reading should be taught before writing and counting, and that within the discipline of reading learning to spell should precede reading by syllables.⁴² Another author recommended that children learn their ABC from the age of two or three,⁴³ and another that children should learn to read, write and speak properly from the age of three or four, at which age teaching should take place at home.⁴⁴ Thus a contemporary viewer of NG 4077 would have understood this to be the age of the younger child, rather than the five to seven years old that has been elsewhere proposed.⁴⁵ The older child appears to be too young to be a governess, so is perhaps an older sister or other relation. It has been suggested that the painting is a pendant to NG 4078, which portrays the son of Chardin’s friend Jean‐Jacques Le Noir, a Paris ébéniste and furniture dealer, and that it shows others of Le Noir’s family; but their identity cannot be confirmed.⁴⁶ The possibility that NG 4077 is a genre portrait of children in Chardin’s circle is possible, particularly because other genre paintings with subjects close to the picture plane, as in this case, were at the time also identified as portraits.⁴⁷ The question of whether NG 4077 and 4078 formed conceptual pendants is discussed below.

By virtue of its subject matter NG 4077 has been linked to certain Dutch seventeenth‐century paintings: Gerard ter Borch’s The Reading Lesson (Paris, Louvre), Caspar Netscher’s A Lady teaching a Child to read (London, National Gallery, NG 844),⁴⁸ and, by way of contrast, to the more directive teaching being administered in Jan Steen’s The Strict Schoolmaster, in which the child’s finger and the teacher’s pointer both press on the page, as in NG 4077.⁴⁹ The Ter Borch may never have been in Paris during Chardin’s lifetime. However, as Conisbee pointed out, the Netscher was in the Orléans Collection in the Palais Royal, Paris, when NG 4077 was painted.⁵⁰ There it was called ‘La maîtresse d’école’ in Dubois de Saint‐Gelais’s catalogue of that collection, both in the 1727 edition and in that of 1737,⁵¹ so perhaps the choice of title for the painting exhibited at the 1740 Salon, quite apart from anything else, was a nod towards the Netscher. In addition, two details in NG 4077 suggest Chardin’s knowledge of it – firstly the gesture of the child’s right hand and secondly that of its mother, who, like the girl in NG 4077, also holds a pointer. However, NG 4077 is conceptually different from these Dutch paintings because the teacher, unlike that in the Ter Borch or the Netscher, is an older sibling or cousin rather than a mother or governess, and Chardin’s foregrounding and intense observation of the two individuals is itself suggestive of their concentration on the task in hand.

Although John Locke had recommended that young children be taught to read by an older sibling,⁵² the traditional model, in France at least, was for young children of both sexes to be educated by their mothers,⁵³ whose own education was therefore necessary.⁵⁴ Until the mid‐eighteenth century at least, mothers who acted as teachers were bourgeois rather than aristocratic.⁵⁵ It was said of Chardin that C’est toujours de la Bourgeoisie qu’il [Chardin] met en jeu … Il ne vient pas là une Femme du Tiers‐Etat, qui ne croye que c’est une idée de sa figure, qui n’y voye son train domestique, ses manieres rondes, sa contenance, ses ocupations [sic] journalieres, sa morale, l’humeur de ses enfans, son ameublement, sa garde‐robe (It is always the bourgeoisie that Chardin puts in play … There isn’t a woman of the Third Estate who comes [to the Salon] who does not believe that it’s a notion of her look, who doesn’t see her home life, her plain style, her appearance, her daily occupations, her morals, her children’s moods, her furniture, her wardrobe).⁵⁶One might suppose that while the immediate catalyst for this oft‐cited remark was the exhibition at the 1741 Salon of his La toilette du matin (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum), the use of the word toujours suggests it was equally informed by the exhibition of genre subjects in earlier years, including that of La Maîtresse d’école in 1740. Part of the appeal of NG 4077 to contemporaries was perhaps in the precociousness of the older ‘sister’ in taking the role of the ideal mother, who, as one writer put it in 1728, ‘par sa bone [sic] Education est dévenue prudente, douce, patiente, laborieuze, intelligente, gracieuze, économe, modeste, juste, bienfaizante, ocupée des soins de la premiere Education de ses enfans…’ (‘through her good education has become careful, kind, patient, hard‐working, intelligent, gracious, economical, modest, equitable, charitable, occupied with the oversight of her children’s early [page 101]education’).⁵⁷ It would not have been difficult for some of these qualities to be read into Chardin’s young schoolmistress – especially because it was probably painted at just the time when Louis Desplaces made engravings after a pair of pictures by Charles‐Antoine Coypel contrasting different approaches to education: Education douce et insinuante donnée par une Sainte and Education Seche et rebutante donnée par une prude.⁵⁸ More specifically, however, and as the title of both the Salon painting and the print after it suggest, the girl was likely seen as imitating not so much her mother as her teacher, or at any rate her mother in her role as teacher.⁵⁹ In her silence and her use of a baguette (pointer), she seems to be following closely the advice to teachers of one of the Orders established in Paris for teaching girls: Il sera bien utile que toutes les maîtresses s’accoutument à se servir plus de signes de que les maîtresses ne perdent du temps, que les filles ne répondent pour s’excuser et que les autres n’en soient distraites, elles en seront toutes plus attentives, plus respectueuses et plus accoutumées au silence. (It will be very useful for all schoolmistresses to get used to utilising a pointer rather than words to express what they want to say to the girls, something which will stop the mistresses losing time and the girls from replying with excuses that distract the other pupils, so that they’ll be more attentive, more respectful and more accustomed to the silence.)⁶⁰Thus the young schoolmistress in NG 4077 is seen both to adopt a proto‐schoolmistress role and to apply the teaching methods to which she herself, one might assume, has been subject. Whether or not The Young Schoolmistress might be read (whether on its own or as part of a pair) as conveying moralising points associated with the seventeenth‐century iconography of the schoolroom, it is more than an illustration of education,⁶¹ because the content as well as the process of education were seen as imbued with moral purpose. According to l’abbé de Saint‐Pierre, the ideal mother who had received a good education would contribute incomparably more to the happiness of her family than one who on account of her bad education might become ‘vaine, fière, impatiente, oisive, joueuze, dépensiere, d’une humeur aigre, dissipée, incomplaizante & uniquement ocupée de ses amuzemens’ (‘vain, proud, impatient, lazy, prone to playing games, spendthrift, bad‐humoured, dissipated, unhelpful and concerned only with her pleasures’).⁶²

Nevertheless, the process of educating girls created a tension not only because the display of too much learning by a woman was deemed inappropriate,⁶³ but also because reading was seen as capable of undermining a woman’s virtue.⁶⁴ When female children were mentioned in eighteenth‐century texts, they tended to be seen not as children but as future women;⁶⁵ in the eighteenth‐century novel girls were generally transformed into women with affective sexuality at the age of 12 or 13 – precisely the proposed age of Chardin’s schoolmistress in NG 4077 . ⁶⁶ Chardin’s genre pictures might have been seen as rose‐tinted visions of domesticity offering a promise of harmony.⁶⁷ In the context of contemporary perceptions of pubescent girls, however, Chardin’s schoolmistress and her relationship with the young child offered other possibilities to the imagination. Démoris wrote of NG 4077: Few canvases show more clearly than this one how much the ‘Chardin effect’ is based on the absence of psychological indications, what were known at the time as the signs of the passions. One might imagine some grumpiness on the part of the child, a smile on the part of the young girl. There is nothing here other than the intensity of the glance and the situation from which it arises.⁶⁸Chardin certainly eschewed the conventional signs of the ‘passions’ adopted by history painters, but it is the absence of these, which is not the same as an absence of psychological indications, that (as with the paintings of Watteau for example) gives space for imaginative interpretations and for the affective qualities of his genre paintings.⁶⁹

It was this space that Lépicié’s print reduced by encouraging the viewer to interpret it, and by a form of osmosis the painting itself, in terms of the ‘concentration boudeuse et confiante du plus jeune, le mélange d’attention et de distraction, de tendresse et de supériorité moqueuse de l’aînée déjà si coquette…’ (‘the sulky, inward concentration of the younger child, the mixture of attentiveness and distraction, of kindness and superciliousness of the already so selfconciously self-consciously elegant older child …’).⁷⁰ The print directs the viewer towards a reading of the girl as mischievous, if not somewhat malign, in various ways.⁷¹ Most obviously, Lépicié added verses, which may be translated: ‘If this charming child puts on so well the serious manner and the imposing appearance of a schoolmistress, may one not think that artifice and subtlety are granted to the fair sex no later than at birth.’⁷² The verses reinforce changes (by reference to NG 4077) to the image: the strengthening of the protagonists’ eyebrows and eyelashes, the reinforcement of the eyelids and the lips of the girl, indicating marginally more of the pupil of her eye and giving her nose a slightly more pointed tip. This combination of alterations make makes her more a young adult and less a pre‐adolescent child, a process of sexualisation further advanced by Duflos’s engraving, in which the lips of the young schoolmistress have been coloured crimson.

Another difference between print and painting is that in the painting the child is reading from a book, of which the right‐hand side (from our point of view) is covered by a loose sheet of paper bearing indecipherable marks. The suggestion is that the loose sheet covers clues – pictograms, perhaps – to what the child is trying to read in the uncovered part of the book. On the other hand, in the print Lépicié obscured the separateness of the loose sheet so that what appears to be presented to the child to read is an open exercise book or a single, wide sheet of paper on which decipherable letters have [page 102]been engraved (fig. 7).⁷³ Lépicié also added letters to the pages the child is trying to read. They are (from top to bottom): ‘O P B[?] O / A[?] P O / O’. The letters evidently do not correspond to the order of the alphabet, nor to any known word (whether in French or in Latin, the languages commonly taught at elementary level).⁷⁴ Rather they are likely to be based on a method for teaching children to read as advocated by Pierre Pipoulain‐Delaunay in his Méthode du sieur Py‐Poulain de Launay ou l’Art d’apprendre à lire le François et le latin (1719) and as published by his son in abbreviated form in Alphabet pour les enfans, contenant les 8 leçons de la méthode de M. De Launay … (1750).⁷⁵ According to this method, after a child had learnt the names of the letters it was to be taught double and triple letters; as it learnt to spell, it was claimed, the child would naturally also learn to read. The first lesson was the alphabet, the second lesson double letters, the third double consonants and triple letters, and so on. Tables of letters such as ab, ac, ad and ba, ca, da, and so on, provided examples for the second lesson, and another set of tables of letters such as br, fl, sc and then ecr, odr, eph, bli provided examples for the third.⁷⁶ Pipoulain‐Delaunay claimed his father’s method to be an advanced way of teaching based on experience.⁷⁷ Lépicié’s print appears to show the older child’s use and adaptation of the method for the benefit of the younger. The method’s apparent popularity – the 1750 edition of Pipoulain‐Delaunay’s book was the fourth – makes it likely that the print‐buying public would have recognised this. The claim that NG 4077 shows Chardin’s advocacy of a particular method of teaching might therefore be better made for Lépicié’s print – with one qualification. From the younger child’s point of view the letters are upside down, so rendering its task exceptionally difficult, and one might wonder whether Lépicié has subtly changed the narrative of Chardin’s painting from a sympathetic observation of sibling behaviour to one in which the older child is given a more knowing, indeed mocking, nature (but is herself mocked in the appended verses). Arguably, and this applies as much to the painting as to the print after it, the use of a night table (if that is what it is) as the ‘seat of learning’ itself gently mocks the pretensions of the older child.⁷⁸

If NG 4077 is considered as a painting on its own terms, and without any additional meaning adduced by Lépicié’s modifications, it becomes more difficult to assume that it was a conceptual pair to any other painting by Chardin. Conisbee considered that the version of The House of Cards now in the National Gallery (NG 4078), showing the son of the ébéniste M. Le Noir, was quite likely painted as the pendant to NG 4077, while noting ‘“minor” variations in dimensions and the differences in handling … probably [attributable] to the space of about a year in their execution’.⁷⁹ Conisbee was much influenced by their respective formal qualities and their complementary colours: positive warm notes in NG 4077 and the cool range of NG 4078. He also noted the contrast between the boy’s self‐absorption in NG 4078 and the psychological contact in NG 4077 between the ‘schoolmistress’ and her young charge. Rosenberg had hinted at the possibility of the two pictures being pendants in 1979, when suggesting that NG 4077 might show other children of M. Le Noir,⁸⁰ and was firmly of that opinion in 1999;⁸¹ he was less so when the painting was exhibited in Madrid in 2011.⁸² Conisbee had meanwhile reiterated his earlier opinion, citing with approval Marianne Roland Michel’s view that the two pictures were pendants and that the children in NG 4077 were other members of the Le Noir family. Roland Michel noted that both paintings were engraved by Lépicié and that they accorded with each other in tonality and scale, and even in their sentiment.⁸³ The fact that NG 4078 was painted some three or four years after NG 4077 (see entry to NG 4078) does not of itself exclude the later painting from having been conceived as a pendant to the earlier. On the other hand, the fact that they were both engraved by Lépicié is not sufficient reason to regard the two paintings as pendants, particularly because their respective authorial identifications were given in different form, that of NG 4077 in French (‘Peint par Chardin’) and that of The House of Cards in Latin (‘J.B. Simeon Chardin pinxit’). In addition, different fonts were used for the appended verses, a curious thing to do had Lépicié himself intended to market the prints as pendants.

The two paintings certainly work well together when hung as pendants (as they often have been at the National Gallery, on either side of Drouais’s portrait of Mme de Pompadour) and, seen through the prism of Lépicié’s prints and their appended verses, the connection is reinforced thematically. However, it seems improbable that Chardin, having painted NG 4077, supposedly showing two children of his friend Jean‐Jacques Le Noir, on a canvas to which he was likely to have had ready access, would paint as a pendant another child of Le Noir on a canvas some 5.5 cm wider. In addition, no mention is made in the 1740 Salon livret of the picture being a pendant, unlike some other Salon paintings by Chardin exhibited singly, for example no. 71 of the 1746 Salon and no. 60 of the 1747 Salon. The same applies to the livret of the 1741 Salon, at which The House of Cards was exhibited. There is no reference whatever during the eighteenth century to a composition that might be NG 4077 being a pendant of NG 4078, nor to it as showing any of the Le Noir children. Indeed, if a date for NG 4077 of around 1737 is accepted, it is impossible that the older child could be a legitimate daughter [page 103]of Le Noir, since his marriage took place in 1731.⁸⁴ Rather, as Rosenberg and Conisbee have themselves noted, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries if a painting that might be NG 4077 was referred to as a pair with anything it was with a version of Les Bulles de Savon.⁸⁵ Such a pairing was also assumed more recently by Wildenstein.⁸⁶ However, of the extant autograph versions of Les Bulles de Savon (in New York, Washington and Los Angeles) only the first, which has apparently been cut down on the right‐hand side, had dimensions that may originally have corresponded to those of NG 4077. That painting, however, was probably the one paired in the 1779 Trouard sale with a composition of a young boy making a house of cards.⁸⁷ This does not entirely answer the question of whether NG 4077 was once a pair to another picture by Chardin, since, as mentioned above, there may have existed a fourth, now lost version of Les Bulles de Savon.⁸⁸ Nevertheless, in the absence of further information either about the extended Le Noir family (leading to a possible identification of two of its members with the children in NG 4077) or about the early provenance of the picture, it is impossible to suppose with any conviction that NG 4077 and NG 4078 were in the same collection before the second half of the nineteenth century or that NG 4077 was a pair to any other picture. It is more likely that it was John Webb, experienced dealer in furniture, who recognised the value of marrying NG 4077 with The House of Cards.⁸⁹

Critical Reception

When NG 4077 or another autograph version of it was shown at the 1740 Salon, together with four other paintings by Chardin (La mère laborieuse, Le bénédicité and two singeries), the Mercure de France wrote of them collectively thus: Les Tableaux de ce Peintre sont dans une réputation constante de plaire au Public & géneralement à tout le monde, aux sçavans, aux ignorans, & aux gens de tout âge et de tous Etats; en effet, dans les Ouvrages de cet habile Artiste, la Nature est imitée avec tant de justesse & de naiveté, que cela a fait dire à quelques Conoisseurs [sic] que le Peintre avoit trouvé, par son aplication [sic], les moyens de prendre la Nature sur le fait, & d’enlever furtivement ce qu’elle a de plus naif & de plus piquant. (This painter’s pictures are always reputed to please the public and everyone generally, the knowledgeable, the ignorant, people of all ages and all classes; in effect, in this talented artist’s works, nature is imitated with so much correctness and straightforwardness, that it has caused some connoisseurs to say the painter has found through his diligence, the means to catch nature in the act, and to sneakily kidnap its most innocent and original properties.)⁹⁰According to another commentator, M. Chardin a sçu se conserver les bonnes graces du Public, par trois petits Tableaux qui ont beaucoup plû: La Mère laborieuse, la petite Maîtresse d’École, le Benedicité. Quelle élégance, quel naturel, quelle vérité! Le spectateur sent plus qu’il ne peut dire. (M. Chardin has known how to harbour the goodwill of the public with three small pictures which have been a great success: The Hard‐working Mother, the little Schoolmistress and Saying Grace. What style, what unaffectedness, what truth! The viewer feels more than he can express.)⁹¹The work was not, however, singled out for comment at the time, except possibly indirectly in Philippe Mercier’s ironic The Bible Lesson, and the mezzotint made after it by John Faber the Younger in 1743, in which a mother reads to a small girl, whose concentration is elsewhere, and a younger boy who appears partly to cover his ears (London, British Museum).⁹² Nor was NG 4077 singled out by Messrs Christie & Manson when they advertised the James Stuart sale in 1850,⁹³ or the subject of further press comment until its acquisition by the Gallery in 1925, when The Times called it a ‘charming and masterly example of [Chardin’s] work’.⁹⁴ Now considered by all recent authorities on the artist to be the better of the extant autograph versions of the composition, Chardin’s The Young Schoolmistress has in recent years also been greatly appreciated by contemporary British artists (see under Exhibitions).⁹⁵

General References

Blanc 1862–3, p. 15; Goncourt (1882) 2007, p. 93; National Gallery Trafalgar Square and Millbank Directors’ Reports 1925, p. 3; National Gallery Trafalgar Square Catalogue 1929, pp. 61–2; Pascal and Gaucheron 1931, p. 132 (referring mainly to the version once in the Henri de Rothschild collection); Wildenstein 1933, no. 169; Davies 1946, pp. 15–16; Davies 1957, pp. 128–9; Wildenstein 1963, no. 80, as about 1731–2; Wildenstein 1969, no. 80; Laclotte 1965, p. 26; Rosenberg 1983, no. 104; Wilson 1985, p. 92; Rosenberg and Temperini 1999, ill. pp. 114–15, p. 117 and no. 105 (as painted in 1736).

Notes