A surgeon's sign was the first work which brought the young man, who had received no systematic education, into notice. The surgeon is in his shop attending to a man who has been wounded in a duel, grouped around are curious bystanders, while the commissary of police investigates the case with a grave countenance. It is the first picture of the Parisian life of the people. And Chardin, with his middle-class origin, remained the advocate of middle-class domestic life. He is the Watteau of the Third Estate. Greuze owes his success, in the first place, to the ingenious manner in which he made himself the spokesman of the moral tendency of his age. It interested contemporary society to be told that it is beautiful to see married folk live together in happiness; that young mothers do a good action in nursing their children, when it is possible, themselves; that man should repent of his sins; and that he who honours his father and mother lives long in the land. Nowadays we thank him for these wise counsels, but say, at the same time, that we could have done without them. We no longer see the necessity of illustrating the ten commandments, and notice now all the more the mannerisms, the rhetorical strokes of advocacy which the painter must employ in order to plead successfully. Chardin's effect is as fresh to-day as it was a hundred years ago, because he was a sheer artist, who did not seek to tell a story, but only to represent,--a realist of the finest stamp, belonging in his exquisite sense of colour values to the illustrious family of the Terburgs. His pictures have no "purpose." The washerwoman, the woman scraping carrots, the housewife at her manifold tasks--that is Chardin's world; the atmosphere in which these figures move, the shimmering light that floats in the half-dark kitchen, the wealth of sun-rays that play upon the white tablecloths and brown-panelled walls--those are his fields of study. Chardin lived in an old studio, high up near the roof, a quiet, dark room that was usually full of vegetables which he used for his "still life." There was something picturesque about the dusty walls where the moist green of vegetables mingled so harmoniously with the time-worn, sombre brown of the wainscoting, and the white table-cloth was flooded with the silvery green which poured in from a little skylight. In this peaceful and harmoniously toned chamber were laid those small domestic scenes, which he so loved to paint, and which were called by the French, in contrast to the _Fétes Galantes_, "_Amusements de la Vie Privée_." The clock ticks, the lamp burns, water is boiling on the homely tiled stove. There is an effect in every one of his pictures, as though he had lived them himself, as if they were reminiscences of something dear to him and familiar. In contrast to Greuze he shunned all critical moments, and depicted only the quiet life of custom, everyday life as it befell in a constant, regular routine.