SOME paintings thrill, some horrify, some offer a unique kind of solace. It's that latter sense of consolation I've always felt when I've spent time with one of the most lovely works in our public collections, Jean-Siméon Chardin's Lady Taking Tea (1
735).
For more than 20 years I've found this 18th-century painting in the Hunterian Art Gallery, at Glasgow University, is endowed with miraculous properties. According to my own experience it can alleviate exam stress, cure heartbreak or even, as on my visit this week, provide a simple antidote to Glasgow's eternally pouring rain.
The subject, long reputed to be Chardin's first wife Marguerite Saintard, takes centre stage in a bijou and absolutely charming new show, which brings her together with another 18th-century lovely, François Boucher's Woman On A Daybed (1743), a painting once known as Madame Boucher, on loan from the Frick Collection in New York.
The exhibition celebrates a moment in history when art turned both inward and outward. Painting was turning towards both the domestic interior and the inner life, and, following the custom of fashionable Parisian homes, it was also becoming increasingly international: cluttered with oriental trinkets and outrageous foreign habits such as the drinking of tea.
To reflect this, the paintings on show have been bolstered by domestic details: a clutter of Chinoiserie and historic teapots, contemporary treatises on tea – bound to end in "effeminacy and impotence" according to one commentator – and prints that reflect the popular taste for the artists on show.
The art is, however, the star. What makes the Chardin such a great painting? It's the extraordinary sense of psychological and physical intimacy. We see, up close, a fashionable lady dressed in magnificent striped silk. Her hair is powdered and curled in a style the catalogue informs me was known as tète de mouton. Each grey, lamb-like wave is echoed in the wisps of steam that rise from the cup and in the curls of the blue design on her large oriental cup. But none of this is served up coquettishly for our viewing.
The lady in question is in part profile, with her back partly towards us. She is utterly absorbed, oblivious to our gaze. The background is sparse; the simple objects in the room – a table, a cup, a spoon and a chair – are odd in perspective but surprisingly robust. The painting is forthright, modern and astonishingly beautiful. In the unusually empty space behind the sitter we find ample room for our own thoughts.
The power of this masterpiece is such that it provides a strong enough magnet for some magnificent loans, the Boucher from New York, and an extraordinary sexy scene from the same artist, Woman Fastening Her Garter, which has come from Madrid. There are paintings from Stockholm and for the first time in hundreds of years the Chardin has been reunited with another work by the same artist, The House Of Cards, which now belongs to the Rothschild family. The pulling power is an important reminder that Glasgow University's art collection really is outstanding and one must hope that the gallery will have the chance and the support to pull off similar small miracles in the future.
Chardin, a painter of still life, was new to these domestic subjects we now call genre painting, and he was only just finding his way with the human form. It was as though meeting a challenge he was unencumbered and he stumbled his way to brilliance. Seeing Lady Taking Tea alongside its close contemporary The House Of Cards, a young man playing with a deck of cards, we are seeing an artist take flight. He is stolid and rather lumpen, encumbered by unnecessary domestic detail. She is positively incandescent; fleshy yet ethereal. Half real woman, half obvious fiction; all miraculous paint.
The thrill of the paintings in this show is not just in their historical importance (which is undoubted) but also in the exciting spaces and stories they chart. We are seeing for the first time the lived lives of rather grand women (not goddesses or courtesans), the fripperies by which they are adorned, the routines of morning toilet (or grooming) and the intimate role play of the domestic interior which was often enough a theatrical, near-public space. The inner life of contemplation, romantic feelings, letter writing and games is set against the rich texture of clothing, ornament, furniture and flesh.
In Chardin we see the world with a kind of melancholy intensity; his players are part of a sober yet rather well-dressed morality play. Hard work, domestic duty, mortality and dutiful love laced with, perhaps, a moderate frisson of erotic potential. In Boucher we have a rip-roaring sexual comedy, full of drama and humour and styled to the max like an 18th-century Sex And The City.
Woman On A Daybed is a fantastically frothy confection: set against ornate damask wallpaper, a Chinese screen and some fashionable trinkets, the woman in question lounges on her daybed, the room strewn with romantic debris, and what we might assume is a love letter, abandoned halfway through the reading. On her feet are pink and white mules, know as pompadour heels, as glamorous and utterly impractical as Carrie Bradshaw's Manolos. There are references to tea-drinking, too, on the little shelves behind her bed, with their teapot and cups and a comic statuette of the god of luck.
Woman Fastening Her Garter takes the sex a notch further with a finely dressed, glamorous subject, a flash of stocking, the presence of a lascivious, pink-tongued kitten and sense of reckless abandonment and play. There is a fire in the hearth and a maid in attendance – what they might be talking about we are left to guess.
In Chardin, the act of solitary tea-drinking was an audaciously modern and unusual subject for a painting. Tea was a social ritual, acted out in company. Lone tea drinking was suspect or, in the case of Chardin's wife, possibly medicinal. She was terribly ill and died of lung disease some two months after his painting was completed.
Interestingly, the exhibition's curator, Anne Dulau, is unequivocal. Despite the reputation of both the key paintings, neither sitter is in fact the artist's wife. And yet, if not an actual portrait, Lady Taking Tea seems a powerful, symbolic representation of Chardin's first wife.
It was surely based on an intimacy with her daily habits and the traditional symbolism of the evaporating steam, infused with Chardin's knowledge that his wife was truly ailing. The objects relate to real items in Marguerite's possession and Dulau argues that, while in later images these trinkets occasionally appear, they become hazy and indistinct, lacking the living substance they once had in 1735.
The best works of art constantly hover like this between apparent authenticity and a keen sense of their own fictional qualities. This is a lovely show which reminds us of how delightful and rich a great painting can be. v
Until December 13
www.hunterian.gla.ac.uk