He was a man of short stature, broad-shouldered and muscular.  Liked by his friends and colleagues for his frankness, there was a salt savour in his forthright speech—­he never learned to play the courtier.  His manners were not polished, a certain rusticity clung to him always, but his honesty was appreciated and he held positions of trust.  Affectionate, slow—­with the Dutch slowness praised by Rodin—­and tenacious, he set out to conquer a small corner in the kingdom of art, and to-day he is first among the Little Masters.  This too convenient appellation must not class him with such myopic miniaturists as Meissonier.  There are breadth of style, rich humanity, largeness of feeling, apart from his remarkable technique, that place him in the company of famous portrait painters.  He does not possess what are called “general ideas”; he sounds no tragic chords; he has no spoor of poetry, but he sees the exterior world steadily; he is never obvious, and he is a sympathetic interpreter in the domestic domain and of character.  His palette is as aristocratic as that of Velasquez:  the music he makes, like that of the string quartet, borders on perfection.

At his debut he so undervalued his work that Vanloo, after reproaching the youth for his modesty, paid him double for a picture.  Another time he gave a still-life to a friend in exchange for a waistcoat whose flowery pattern appealed to him.  His pictures did not fetch fair prices during his lifetime; after more than half a century of hard work he left little for his widow.  Nor in the years immediately subsequent to that of his death did values advance much.  The engraver Wille bought a still-life for thirty-six livres, a picture that to-day would sell for thousands of dollars.  At the beginning of the last century, in 1810, when David was ruler of the arts in Paris, the two masterpieces in pastel, now in the Louvre, the portraits of Chardin aux besicles, and the portrait of Marguerite Pouget, his second spouse, could have been bought for twenty-four francs.  In 1867 at the Laperlier sale the Pourvoyeuse was sold for four thousand and fifty francs to the Louvre, and forty years later the Louvre gave three hundred and fifty thousand francs to Madame Emile Trepard for Le Jeune Homme au Violon and l’Enfant au Toton.  Diderot truly prophesied that the hour of reparation would come.

He is a master of discreet tonalities and a draughtsman of the first order.  His lighting, more diffused than Rembrandt’s, is the chief actor in his scene.  With it he accomplishes magical effects, with it he makes beautiful copper caldrons, humble vegetables, leeks, carrots, potatoes, onions, shining rounds of beef, hares, and fish become eloquent witnesses to the fact that there is nothing dead or ugly in nature if the vision that interprets is artistic.  It is said that no one ever saw Chardin at work in his atelier, but his method, his facture has been ferreted out though never excelled.  He employs