Celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Chardin (1699-1779) this outstanding new work presents an in-depth study of one of France's best loved painters, admired for his exquisite still lifes and charming scenes of domestic life. Respected by Manet and Cezanne, an inspiration to Morandi and Soutine, Chardin was above all a man of his time.The first fruits of Pierre Rosenberg's research were published in 1979, to great acclaim. This new work extends the boundaries of Chardin scholarship with new findings relating to the artist's life and the chronology of his oeuvre. Turning his back on the world of his contemporaries Fragonard and Boucher, and evading easy but erroneous comparison with Flemish painters of interiors, Chardin gradually focused more and more on the spaces between objects rather than the objects themselves. As the details in his still life compositions shrink away, Chardin emerges as "the painter of pure painting", and the precursor of many artists of a century and more later.Authoritative texts by Pierre Rosenberg and Renaud Temperini reveal Chardin's world, illuminated by his life, friends, and colleagues, and above all by the audience for whom he produced some of the most popular works of the eighteenth century.