Boucher & Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners
Until December 13; Hunterian Gallery, Glasgow

How much can there be to say about a Lady Taking Tea and a Woman On A Daybed? The possibilities for discussion seem to be limitless, if a new show at the Hunterian Gallery is anything to go by. The two 18th century masterpieces, by Jean-Siméon Chardin and François Boucher, were painted just eight years apart, in Paris, but while one is modest and morally upstanding, the other is lavish and saucy.

Chardin’s tea-drinking lady is calm and absorbed in a private moment, as she stirs her steaming cup. She is wearing fine clothes, but the atmosphere is low-key, almost humble. To modern eyes, nothing could be more unremarkable than this quiet tea-break, and this chunky brown tea-pot. In France of 1735, however, tea-drinking was largely the eccentric preserve of artists and lovers of English fashion, and ownership of tea-pots was aspirational. Chardin’s young wife did own a brown tea-pot, and drank tea every day, probably because of its reputed medicinal properties. Suffering from a painful lung disease, she died only two months after the painting was finished.

Boucher’s painting is also reputed to be his wife, but while the beauty lounging on her daybed is dark-haired, Boucher’s wife was blonde. This lady, with all her frills and ruches, blends in with the pink furniture as if she was a part of it. In fact, this image is about pretty objects of every kind, and she is merely one of them. While draperies, porcelain, letters and more suggest a casual, luxurious clutter, they are orchestrated down to the last ball of string, fallen like a full stop on the floor.

These two paintings are at the heart of Masters Of Modern Manners, the Hunterian’s first ever collaboration with the Wallace Collection in London. Reaching out from the pair, like spokes from a wheel, is an eclectic range of topics for further exploration: the history of tea drinking; the 18th century fashion for all things Chinese; the morning toilet, when ladies were dressed; William Hogarth’s English satires on all of the above, and the growth of genre painting (anonymous scenes of everyday life) in France.

It’s a quirky little exhibition whose extensive background research is not matched by its presentation. The odd space which it occupies – an island in the centre of the gallery’s permanent collection – prevents the grouping of pictures in anything more than two at a time. Direct comparisons are lost, such as a wonderful trio of related pictures from Stockholm and Madrid, sadly split up across a room, and tea-pots placed far from the pictures in which they feature.

The exhibition boasts two firsts. The central Boucher painting, borrowed from the Frick Collection in New York, hasn’t been seen in Britain for 70 years. The key Chardin painting belongs to the Hunterian, but is re-united for the first time since the 18th century with a work probably conceived to sit alongside it, The House Of Cards.

Lady Taking Tea certainly out-classes its partner. A curtain divides us from the young man in The House Of Cards, creating a space more theatrical than the authentic, intimate space of his female counterpart. The man is smaller than she is, although a faint shadow of the original outline suggests that his was once a larger figure.

Chardin had no formal training in figure painting, having made his name as a painter of still lifes. Legend has it that he was inspired to try after criticising the figures of a friend, who retorted “you seem to imagine that this is as easy to paint as pastries and sausages”. After a few stilted attempts over two years, Chardin succeeded in making it look just as easy.

Other great works in the show include Chardin’s Scullery Maid, whose sensuousness lies not in the subject matter but in the thick, creamy paint that makes you want to lick the surface clean; and a number of contrasting images of ladies at their morning toilet. Boucher chose to show a sexy young woman fastening her garter, while Chardin steered clear of such impropriety with a child’s bonnet being fixed on for church.

Nicolas Lancret’s interpretation of the theme wins the prize for the most outrageous. A cleric’s eyes are popping out of his head as the lady of the house bends over to pour his tea, her breasts tumbling out of her loosely-tied gown. The morning toilet was, bizarrely, a fashionable time to receive guests.

It’s easy to feel a little baffled by this handful of high-quality images from one of France’s most creative periods: pink ribbons, garters and mislaid nipples seem to have little to do with Chardin’s dusky scenes of quiet domesticity. That is surely the point. The growth of genre painting in Paris was gloriously diverse, and so, it seems, were modern manners.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 05.10.08