That world, of which Chardin has given us so veracious yet so poetic a chronicle, was indeed the world of his daily life. His art concerned itself with the familiar pursuits of the lower middle class, homely because it was bound to be frugal, but refined because it was French. The grosser manners which reflected accurately--as manner is wont to do--the duller thoughts of our English lower middle class of a hundred years since, would never have afforded to an artist who desired inspiration from that class alone, such an opportunity as was offered to Chardin by the lower _bourgeoisie_ of France. The ruder civilisation of the London of that period provoked from English art no such exquisite transcript. And had it come, it could hardly have been welcomed, for in the two countries the taste of the day was different--the one was finer than the other. A similarity in coarseness, in imaginative Literature--the unquestioned grossness of Rétif de la Bretonne, placed by the side of the grossness of Smollett--may seem to deny it. But pictorial art makes the contrast evident. In France it was possible not only for Chardin to exist, but for him to be valued. In a life that was eighty years long--a life mainly calm, and filled with peaceful work--Chardin was of course able to accomplish much, and to labour with variety; but whatever may have been his great successes in other departments of Art than that of _genre_ painting, it is by his mastery and originality in that that he may be expected most to interest us. It was to that that he chiefly devoted the middle years of his career. Other successes established his fame; other successes came happily to its support, long afterwards, when he was failing. We do not note, indeed, in Chardin, rapid transitions, sudden transformations--the one occupation was apt to overlap the other--but until we are to look into his course in great detail it may be accepted as roughly true that it was first still-life that engrossed him, then scenes of the domestic interior, and then, in the late days, portraiture. Of the two first, he was a painter in oil. For the third he employed pastel.