Fortunately, however, though popularity passed from him, the old man was able to interest himself in a fresh department of work. He had painted a few portraits at an earlier time, but now his attention was attracted to portraiture in pastel--that was the medium in which an artist as masculine as himself, and as penetrating, had obtained an admitted triumph; and why should Chardin fail where Quentin Latour had brilliantly succeeded? Nor did he fail altogether. He was able to draw back upon himself, in the last years, a little of the old attention. And the pastel portraits, if they had the ‘_fragilité_’ had also the ‘_éclat_,’ which a well-known verse attributes to the then fashionable method. And in subjects which were portraits only, the flesh tints were no longer, by any possibility, effaced by the stronger reality which somehow Chardin had been wont to bestow upon the accessories in his pictures. Pleasant to him and well merited as must have been that slight return of appreciation which came to Chardin in his eighth decade, it is not by the labour of that time that we are now likely to class him. With the galvanised revival of a classical ideal, his name, after his death, fell into dishonour. Some of his worthiest pictures tumbled, neglected, about the quays of Paris. Only within the last quarter of a century has there been evident the sign of an intention to do justice to his work; and for us his principal distinction is, as I have said already, that he is not only foremost, but was for years alone, in the perception of the dignity and beauty of humble matter, and of the charm which Art may discover in the daily incidents of the least eventful life. (_The Art Journal_, 1885.) MOREAU