Jean Baptiste Chardin

French painter Jean-Baptise Simeon Chardin (1699-1779) was born in Paris, and became a member of the Royal Academy in 1728. His work finding favour with the King, he lived in an apartment at the Louvre. His painting life fell into three, roughly twenty-year, cycles. For many years he painted scenes of middle-class life, in which children play very important roles; then he painted still lifes, and towards the end of his working life specialised in outstanding pastel portraits. Although his contemporaries respected him, he did not influence them: that came almost two centuries later when Manet and Cezanne built on his techniques of composition and colour.