No engraving--hardly even the soft lights and the opulent shadows of mezzotint--could render the character of this still-life of Chardin’s. No etching, short of Jacquemart’s, could do justice to work in itself so subtle, yet apparently so bold. But the manly and refined line-engraving of the French engravers of the middle of the Eighteenth Century was happily able to translate, with singular excellence, the work of Chardin’s middle age, a work in which the rendering of matter counted indeed for something, yet in which character, sentiment, story counted also for much. It was in 1734, and still at the Place Dauphine, that Chardin showed that which seems to have been the first of his _genre_ pictures--a picture of a woman sealing a letter. From that time onwards, to about the beginning of his last decade, the painter’s work consisted chiefly of the record of the daily life of the civilised _bourgeoisie_, on whom Fortune never smiled too lavishly, but from whom she rarely turned with a quite empty hand. The value of the _bourgeois_ virtues, of reticent affection, of subdued love, of calm persistency in uneventful and continually recurring labour, Chardin himself must have felt. Unlike too many of his Dutch brethren, he saw life, and dealt with it, where life was not gross. His children have an unconscious innocence along with their reflectiveness; his boys are all ingenuous; his young women bring the delightfulness of grace to the diligent doing of household work in kitchen or parlour; and his seniors, in gaining experience, have not lost sweetness. And with the interest of pleasantness you have in Chardin’s case the assurance of the interest of truth. Hogarth was as true, but he was less pleasant; Morland was as pleasant, but he was less true. Hogarth painted an individual; Morland generalised or idealised the individual, and was contented with a type. Chardin’s figures do not cease to be typical of the race, while they retain the delicate accuracy of personal studies, and betray an untiring reference not to a few models only, but to all the nature he lived amongst. Always without exaggeration, always with directness and a deep simplicity, the self-effacing art of Chardin accomplished its task, writing for us in picture after picture, or print after print, the history of the quietest of refined lives that the Eighteenth Century knew; arresting for us the delicate gesture, in itself so slight, yet so completely revealing; and tracing, on honest and sensitive faces, every expression that rises above broad comedy, or falls short of high passion.