{"slug":"chardin-and-a-lady-taking-tea-how-a-still-life-painter-turned-to-people","title":"Chardin and A Lady Taking Tea: How a Still-Life Painter Turned to People","topic":"tea_in_art","excerpt":"In 1735 a painter of fruit and copper pots painted a woman stirring her tea. Who Chardin was, why he turned to people, and what tea meant in his Paris.","published_at":"2026-10-06T03:38:01Z","web_url":"https://timebeforetea.com/articles/45-chardin-and-a-lady-taking-tea-how-a-still-life-painter-turned-to-people","content":"*A Lady Taking Tea* was painted in Paris in 1735 by **Jean-Siméon Chardin**, a cabinetmaker's son who had made his name painting fruit, game, and kitchen pots. It shows a woman at a small red table, stirring a cup of tea as the steam drifts past a brown teapot. It hangs today in the Hunterian Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow, which considers it one of his greatest achievements.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-1\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\n\nIt's a small, quiet picture of a very ordinary moment. That's what makes it interesting: Chardin had only recently started painting people at all, and tea was still a novelty in France.\n\n## A painter of animals and fruit\n\nChardin was born in Paris in 1699. He trained with the painter Pierre-Jacques Cazes, assisted Noël-Nicolas Coypel, and passed through the Académie de Saint-Luc, the painters' guild, before he was received into the Royal Academy in 1728 as a painter \"of animals and fruits.\"\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-2\"\u003e2\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-3\"\u003e3\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\n\nThat was both an achievement and a limitation. The Academy ranked still life far below history, mythology, and court subjects, so admission as a still-life painter was a rare honor in a lowly category.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-4\"\u003e4\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e His subjects were the objects of the middle-class household he came from: copper pots, loaves, a dead hare, a glass of water.\n\n## Why he started painting people\n\nThe traditional explanation comes from people who knew him. Chardin, it was said at the time, was **teased into painting the human figure** by his friend, the portraitist Jacques Aved. According to the collector Pierre-Jean Mariette, writing about fifteen years later, his first figure painting was a young man blowing soap bubbles, studied from a model.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-5\"\u003e5\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e The National Gallery of Art in Washington dates its version of *Soap Bubbles* to about 1733–34.\n\nFrom the early 1730s until the early 1750s, genre scenes made up most of his work. He drew on seventeenth-century Dutch painting, where pictures of one or two people absorbed in a household task had a long tradition.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-3\"\u003e3\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e Chardin brought a still-life painter's patience to them. His figures are as solid and quiet as his copper pots, and they're always in the middle of something small: drawing, sealing a letter, building a house of cards, stirring tea.\n\n## The year of the painting\n\nIn 1731 Chardin married **Marguerite Saintard**. She died in 1735, only four years after the wedding, leaving him with a young son, Jean-Pierre.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-2\"\u003e2\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\n\nWriters have long wondered whether the woman at the tea table is Marguerite. There's no way to prove it. But the picture was painted the year she died, of a woman alone with a cup of tea, and it's hard to look at it without thinking about that.\n\nThe painting had a partner. Chardin conceived a *House of Cards*, showing a young man absorbed in his own careful, fragile task, as its pendant.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-6\"\u003e6\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e The two were separated in the eighteenth century and shown together again for the first time at the Hunterian in 2008.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-7\"\u003e7\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e Side by side, they're both about attention: a few minutes spent entirely on one small thing.\n\n## Tea as a new luxury\n\nIn 1735, the painting recorded a habit that was still fairly new to Europe. The Hunterian notes that it reflects two fashions at once: **the drinking of tea and the taste for chinoiserie**, the craze for Chinese and Chinese-style goods.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-8\"\u003e8\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e Look at the table: the cup is blue-and-white porcelain in the Chinese manner, and the teapot and red lacquered table would have read as equally fashionable.\n\nThe museum now hangs the painting at the center of a room called **\"The World in a Teacup.\"** The label there spells out what a cup of sweetened tea involved. Tea came from China on European trading ships, and the sugar stirred into it was produced by enslaved people on plantations in the Americas. Together, the gallery notes, tea and sugar became a domestic ritual \"signifying luxury and respectability,\" built on systems of exploitation far from the drawing room.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-1\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\n\nNone of that is visible in the picture, and that's part of the point. Chardin shows the ritual the way its drinkers experienced it: warm, private, a few minutes to oneself.\n\n## What came after\n\nChardin married again in 1744, to Françoise-Marguerite Pouget. He showed at the Salon from 1737 until his death, served as treasurer of the Academy for nearly twenty years, and received commissions, pensions, and lodgings in the Louvre from Louis XV.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-2\"\u003e2\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e In the 1750s he returned to still life, and at the end of his career made a few pastel portraits.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-3\"\u003e3\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\n\n*A Lady Taking Tea* was acquired by **William Hunter**, the Scottish anatomist and collector, who left his whole collection to the University of Glasgow when he died in 1783.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-1\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\n\n## Looking at it now\n\nWhat still strikes people about the painting is how little happens in it. A woman stirs her tea and waits for it to cool. The steam gets as much care as her shawl.\n\nThat's a fair description of a good cup of tea at home, too. If you'd like to give a cup that kind of attention, our guide to [making tea a daily ritual](/articles/how-to-make-tea-a-daily-ritual-and-why-10-minutes-is-enough) is a good place to start, and [A Short History of Tea](/articles/a-short-history-of-tea-from-yunnan-to-every-kitchen) explains how the leaf reached a Paris tea table in the first place.\n\n*The image at the top of this page is* A Lady Taking Tea *itself, which is in the public domain.*\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-9\"\u003e9\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\n\n*More from our Tea in Painting series: [Mary Cassatt](/articles/mary-cassatt-and-the-tea-table-an-american-impressionist-at-home-in-paris), [Carl Holsøe](/articles/carl-holsoe-and-a-woman-making-tea-the-danish-painter-of-quiet-rooms), [William Henry Margetson](/articles/william-henry-margetson-and-afternoon-tea-an-english-painter-at-the-tea-table), and [Henri Matisse](/articles/matisse-and-tea-a-garden-a-daughter-and-the-summer-of-1919).*\n","product_handles":[],"store_available":false}