Jean Siméon Chardin was born in Paris, the son of a cabinetmaker, and rarely left the city.

He will live on the Left Bank near Saint-Sulpice until 1757, when Louis XV grants him a studio and living quarters in the Louvre.

Chardin had entered into a marriage contract with Marguerite Saintard in 1723, whom he will not marry until 1731.

He serves apprenticeships with the history painters Pierre-Jacques Cazes and Noël-Nicolas Coypel, and in 1724 became a master in the Académie de Saint-Luc.

According to one nineteenth-century writer, at a time when it was hard for unknown painters to come to the attention of the Royal Academy, he first found notice by displaying a painting at the "small Corpus Christi" (held eight days after the regular one) on the Place Dauphine (by the Pont Neuf).

Van Loo, passing by in 1720, bought it and later assisted the young painter. (Édouard Fournier, Histoire du Pont-Neuf, 1862)

Upon presentation of The Ray in 1728, he was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture.

The Ray, hung from a chain and gutted, reads like a Crucifixion.

Paris-born Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, breaking with the style of the times, can be said to be Anti-Rococo.

He paints The White Tablecloth in 1729.

Considered by some to be the greatest of the eighteenth-century French painters, he favors simple still lives and unsentimental domestic interiors, and is known for his beautifully textured still lives as well as his sensitive and touching genre paintings.

Simple, even stark, but treasured paintings of common household items (Still Life with a Smoker's Box) and an uncanny ability to portray children's innocence in a non-sentimental manner (Boy with a Top) account for his timeless appeal.

He is the son of a cabinetmaker, and though largely self-taught, is greatly influenced by the realism and subject matter of the seventeenth-century Low Country masters.

His early support comes from patrons in the French aristocracy, including Louis XV, despite his unconventional portrayal of the rising bourgeoisie.

He had been admitted to the Royal Academy in 1728.

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin had ceded his position in the Académie de Saint-Luc a year after his admission to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, and is now making a modest living by "produc[ing] paintings in the various genres at whatever price his customers chose to pay him", and by such work as the restoration of the frescoes at the Galerie François I at Fontainebleau in 1731. (Rosenberg, Pierre, and Florence Bruyant (2000), Chardin. p. 20. London: Royal Academy of Arts).

His son Jean-Pierre was baptized in November 1731, and a daughter, Marguerite-Agnès, is baptized in 1733.

Largely self-taught, Chardin is greatly influenced by the realism and subject matter of the seventeenth-century Low Country masters.

Despite his unconventional portrayal of the ascendant bourgeoisie, early support comes from patrons in the French aristocracy, including Louis XV.

Though his popularity rests initially on paintings of animals and fruit, by the 1730s he has introduced kitchen utensils into his work.

Soon figures populate his scenes as well, supposedly in response to a portrait painter who had challenged him to take up the genre.

Woman Sealing a Letter (about 1733) may have been his first attempt.

Natoire carries out the first of his tapestry cartoons for the series Histoire de Don Quichotte, woven in 1735 at the Manufacture de Beauvais, the first set for the fermier général Pierre Grimod du Fort (1692–1748).

Chardin’s humble scenes deal with simple, everyday activities, yet they will also function as a source of documentary information about a level of French society not hitherto considered a worthy subject for painting.

The pictures are noteworthy for their formal structure and pictorial harmony.

Chardin has said about painting, "Who said one paints with colors? One employs colors, but one paints with feeling." (Johnson, Paul. Art: A New History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003, p. 414.)