The Painter Monkey, after Jean-Siméon Chardin

Jean-Siméon Chardin’s original painting was probably exhibited at the 1740 Salon, alongside its companion piece, *The Antique-Dealer Monkey*, which is now lost.

‘Singerie’ is a pictorial genre that emerged within Flemish genre painting in the late^16th century. Monkeys dressed in the latest fashions populate village festivals or domestic scenes, satirising sins such as drunkenness, vanity or pimping. Through a series of engravings produced around 1575, the engraver Pieter van der Borcht helped to popularise these motifs amongst artists, notably those of David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690), whose paintings entertained a wide audience.

Chardin, like Watteau, was undoubtedly inspired by the work of David Teniers the Younger when they presented ‘singeries’, which became a veritable fashion in^18th-century France. The success of animal scenes reached its peak with Christophe Huet (1700–1759), a master of the genre who was notably responsible for the ‘Singeries’ at the Château de Chantilly. Another of Chardin’s contemporaries, Alexis Peyrotte (1699–1769), even made this genre his speciality, attracting a wide clientele. One of his most famous paintings, now in the Musée Carnavalet , *Les politiques au jardin des Tuileries*, illustrates how Parisians used to gather in the Tuileries to discuss articles published in the newspapers.

Here, the artist’s studio is depicted in a picturesque manner, complete with all the traditional attributes: palette, drawing board, brushes, a jug of water for diluting the colours, and a stick resting on the canvas to steady the hand. However, he is wearing a tight-fitting frock coat and a tricorn hat adorned with feathers, even though the established artists of the Academy opt for studio attire appropriate to their craft, with loose-fitting garments that facilitate physical agility. This monkey is clearly mimicking an artist.

The element of self-mockery in Chardin’s painting is complex, as the work plays on the reversal of the medieval adage, *Ars simia naturae*: art mimics nature. Some art historians have interpreted this as a critique of the academic method, which encourages artists to copy first from drawings, then from a ‘model’, before practising the direct imitation of nature. The pictorial expression of the ‘painting monkey’ is, in any case, irreverent, clearly mocking the artist who would claim to be able to ‘mimic’ reality. Indeed, the canvas on which the ‘painting monkey’ is working shows the vague outlines of an animal that, at first glance, is difficult to make out, whilst its model is supposed to be an ancient statuette. The animal is therefore not painting the model posed before it, but is working on a portrait, perhaps even a self-portrait.

The mise en abyme becomes all the more dizzying given that, in the copy of the Château de la Motte-Tilly, the canvas depicts another painting by Chardin, *The Antique-Dealer Monkey*. The copyist seems to have deliberately placed his own work as a copyist at the heart of the painting, giving new meaning to the ‘painter monkey’.

There are numerous copies of this painting (Christie’s auction, 9 June 2010), often of more modest dimensions, as in the case of the one held at the Château de la Motte-Tilly or the one held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Chartres.

Florence Boulerie and Katalin Bartha-Kovács. The Monkey in the^17th and^18th Centuries: A Figure in Art, a Literary Character and a Scientific Curiosity, Paris , Hermann, 2019

Pierre Rosenberg, *Chardin*, Geneva, Skira, 1963, 1991.

Pierre Rosenberg, *Chardin*, exhibition catalogue , Paris, Réunion des musées nationaux, 1999.