The Diligent Mother (‘La Mère laborieuse’)

Although it should be counted a major rediscovery, the present Diligent Mother was not entirely unknown before its recent rehabilitation; indeed, it was acquired during Chardin’s lifetime by Sir Charles Wyndham (1710-1763), 2nd Earl of Egremont of Petworth House in West Sussex, at auction in London in 1751, and has appeared in the literature on the artist periodically ever since. However, until its comparatively recent cleaning and restoration, its fine quality was largely hidden. Layers of old varnish, yellowing over centuries, obscured its merits – even Chardin’s signature, now perfectly apparent, was undetectable beneath the film of grime – and so, when it was referenced by scholars, it was generally as a copy or a lesser production of Chardin’s workshop.

The Diligent Mother (‘La Mère laborieuse’) is an exceptionally well-documented replica of one of the most famous compositions in Chardin’s oeuvre. Chardin’s first version of the subject was exhibited with a pendant depicting Saying Grace (‘Le Bénédicité’) at the Paris Salon of 1740, where it was well received by critics and the public alike (fig. 1). Several months later, on 27 November 1740, Chardin was officially presented to Louis XV at Versailles, and in honor of the occasion he offered the two paintings as a gift to the king; they have remained in the French national collections ever since, eventually transferring to the Louvre, where they have been displayed since 1845. Throughout most of the 19th century and to this day, the two paintings have been regarded as quintessential examples of the artist’s work.

In The Diligent Mother, a young mother, her scissors attached to a ribbon at her waist, is seated on a chair from which hangs a work bag. Wearing a bonnet familiar from many of Chardin’s paintings, and rose-and-blue bedroom slippers, she examines some embroidery with her young daughter. Beside them is a yarn-winder, a skein of wool and balls of wool in various colors. A bobbin lies on the tiled floor and a box-shaped pin cushion sits near it. In front of the pin cushion rests a contented pug, 'as compact as a block', in the words of Pierre Rosenberg. At right, a teapot, cup and saucer sit on the mantelpiece, beneath a candelabra; a tall folding screen blocks daylight from the half-opened door at the back of the room. Both the present composition and its original companion uphold the social values of domestic stability and good child-rearing. Saying Grace conveys the treasured values of honor, piety and the sacredness of family life through its depiction of a maid leading her two young charges in giving thanks before a meal. Similarly, The Diligent Mother reproduces the comforts of a bourgeois Parisian household while depicting in its modest silence the relationship of a dutiful mother teaching the ‘domestic arts’ to her obedient child.

The prime version of The Diligent Mother was engraved by François-Bernard Lépicié (1698-1755) and published in December 1740, four months after the Salon ended and just weeks after it was presented to the king. The print included a caption identifying that it is 'After the original Painting in the King’s gallery by Chardin/1741' (as did Lépicié’s subsequent engraving after Saying Grace, published four years later). A verse by Lépicié accompanies the print, stressing a message of diligence and the value of labor, perhaps in stricter terms than Chardin’s affectionate painting really suggests:

‘A trifle distracts you my girl:
Yesterday this foliage was done,
By each stitch I can see
How your mind drifted away.
Believe me, avoid laziness
Remember this one simple truth:
That steadiness, prudence and work
Are more valued than beauty and wealth.’

Unlike Saying Grace, versions of which Chardin exhibited three times at the Salons – in 1740, 1746, and 1761 – he exhibited The Diligent Mother only once, in 1740. At least four autograph versions of Saying Grace are known today, each with very small variations: apart from the original, gifted to the king and today in the Louvre, there is a version in the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, acquired in the late 1760s or early 1770s by Catherine the Great, which is dated ‘1744’ (although not signed) and may have been the picture Chardin exhibited at the Salon in 1746; another version of lesser quality but certainly autograph was in the collection of the 19th century collector Dr. Louis La Caze and given to the Louvre with his bequest in 1869; and a fine version, formerly in the collection of the Earls of Wemyss, and today in the collection of the late Michel David-Weill, New York, who acquired it in 2015. This last served as the pendant to the present painting until the two were separated at auction in 1751. In addition, a very loosely handled preliminary version of the subject, usually referred to as a ‘sketch’, is in the Veil-Picard collection, Paris. Chardin returned to the subject of Saying Grace for a final time, exhibiting a horizontal variant of the composition in the Salon of 1761, his entry reproduced in a marginal illustration of the Salon livret by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin; a copy of the lost original is today in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

Of particular interest for us is yet another version of Saying Grace – a workshop copy of the 1740 original – which was commissioned from Chardin by Count Tessin along with a copy of The Diligent Mother and sent to Sweden in 1741, where the pair remains to this day in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Each was purchased for the modest sum of 180 livres (as opposed to comparable originals from Chardin’s hand for which the artist charged 600 livres). Both paintings bear inscriptions on the reverse of their respective canvases identifying them as copies made in 1741. Produced at the artist’s request by assistants, The Diligent Mother (like its companion) is of notably inferior quality to autograph versions of the composition, including the present painting. It is not known why Tessin – a distinguished collector who acquired several masterpieces by Chardin directly from the artist – agreed to accept two copies by assistants, but it was likely a question of timing. Chardin worked in a famously slow and deliberate manner and would not be rushed: as the artist wrote to the Count in 1746, 'I take my time because I have developed a habit of not leaving my works until to my eyes there is nothing left to be desired, and I hold myself to this more rigorously than ever in order to uphold the favorable opinion with which Count Tessin honors me'. Since, presumably, Tessin wanted replicas of the famous pair of paintings in the royal collection, and wanted them ready to be sent to Stockholm in a consolidated shipment with other paintings (including Chardin’s The Morning Toilet) that was leaving from Paris, via Rouen, in late 1741, he had little choice but to settle for quick copies that could be readied to schedule. The present painting is of an entirely higher level of execution than the Stockholm copy made for Tessin. While Pierre Rosenberg has published it as a 'copie retouchée', this term had a specific meaning for Chardin’s contemporaries. In reference to a version of Chardin’s La Gouvernante (at Tatton Park, Cheshire, fig. 2), which had been sold in May 1745 as 'une copie, retouchée dans plusieurs parties par Chardin', Alastair Laing noted that to 18th century collectors 'this did not mean a copy produced by another hand or in Chardin’s studio, which he had retouched, but an autograph replica, slightly altered by the artist' (A. Laing, In Trust for the Nation, London, 1995, p. 192).

The popularity of Chardin’s composition was no doubt greatly enhanced by the presence of the prime version in the royal collection, accounting for a demand from collectors for replicas. However, it was standard practice for the artist to make several versions of his best and most popular genre scenes, and even many of his still lifes. Apart from the aforementioned versions of Saying Grace, for example, six nearly identical autograph versions of Chardin’s beloved composition The Young Draftsman have been accounted for (the best in the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; and a private collection, New York), and four autograph versions of its companion, The Embroiderer (the best in Stockholm; and a private collection, Russia). Therefore, the emergence of a second autograph version of The Diligent Mother should come as little surprise. (A third version of the composition is recorded in Chardin’s estate sale, 6 March 1780, lot 14; however, its whereabouts today are unknown and it has not been seen since 1877). The delight of the present painting is its fine quality. Now that it has been cleaned, it is apparent that the present Diligent Mother is from the hand of Chardin himself.

The history of the present painting and its former pendant is well-known and well documented. Scholars have tended to focus their attention on the two British aristocrats who acquired the paintings as succeeding lots in a London auction in 1751: Francis Wemyss Charteris, 7th Earl of Wemyss of Gosford House, Scotland, who purchased the Saying Grace (lot 39) for £24.3, and Charles Wyndham, 2nd Earl of Egremont, Petworth House, who bought the present picture (in the preceding lot) for the same sum. As both pictures replicated famous originals in the Louvre; were coated in heavy, discolored varnishes that obscured their fine quality and hid the artist’s signatures; and were held in largely inaccessible country house collections where few scholars saw them in person for more than two centuries, both fell into an unexamined disregard in much of the modern literature on Chardin. In 1979, the most eminent living authority on the artist, Pierre Rosenberg, wrote of the present Diligent Mother that it 'is qualitatively better than the one in Stockholm', but, he asked, 'can one go so far as to call it an original from the hand of Chardin…?'

That this question can now be answered affirmatively finds its most compelling evidence in the identity of the first owner of the two paintings, the printmaker Thomas Major (1720-1799). It was in the sale of his collection in London in April 1751, that The Diligent Mother and its pendant were acquired by the Earls Egremont and Wemyss. The paintings had almost certainly been bought directly from Chardin himself by Major, who subsequently offered them at auction – where they were catalogued as fully autograph works by the master – and sold less than a decade after they were painted. Major had studied drawing and etching under Hubert Gravelot before moving to Paris in 1745, where he was a pupil of the printmakers Charles-Nicolas Cochin (1715-1790) and Jacques-Philippe Le Bas (1707-1783). Cochin was Chardin’s lifelong friend and authored the tribute to the artist read before the Academy in 1780, following Chardin’s death. Le Bas was a principal engraver of Chardin’s works and owned at least two of his paintings, including the famous Cat Stalking a Partridge and a Hare Left Near a Soup Tureen, today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (It should be noted that many of Chardin’s most active original collectors were fellow artists, as Pierre Rosenberg has shown). As Major not only apprenticed to Le Bas, but continued to act as Le Bas’ agent and dealer in London after he returned to the city in 1748, it seems likely that it was Le Bas who introduced Major (a descendent of a prominent and prosperous English family) to Chardin and facilitated the sale of Saying Grace and The Diligent Mother to the wealthy young printmaker.

The recent cleaning and restoration of Thomas Major’s Chardins confirms their quality and status. Chardin’s signatures – authentic and integral to the paint surface, and previously unobserved by scholars – were revealed on both canvases. The ex-Wemyss Saying Grace proved to be in exceptionally good condition, with its thick impasto and dry, chalky, zinc-white passages intact. The Diligent Mother, which was relined to prevent the craquelure of its paint surface from lifting, retains less of its impasto, but displays the little touches and flicks of the brush for which the artist is famed. The mother’s patient and affectionate gaze, the look of intense concentration from her little daughter, the rich and loving attention that the artist lavished on each fall and fold of heavy fabrics, the brilliant and subtle rendering of different shades of white, the choreographic interplay of hands – all are characteristic examples of Chardin’s rare and unexcelled skill.

We are grateful to Dr. Colin B. Bailey, who examined this painting first-hand, for confirming that it is an autograph version by Chardin of his original composition.