Art: Silent Mysteries

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He was a good painter of adults, pensive servants especially--who never, it should be noted, become illustrations for a lecture on class--but his children are marvels. A young boy, the son of one of Chardin's collectors, soberly kitted out in black tricorn hat and mole-colored coat, is attentively building a house of cards--that emblem of fragility that nonetheless does not fall. Another lad, not 10 years old, watches with the most exquisitely rendered absorption the fate of a spinning top on a writing table; it leans under the pull of gravity but is still (only just) erect.

And then there's the girl with the shuttlecock, that magical little refugee from a Piero della Francesca, all inwardness as she contemplates the sneak serve she is about to make. The painting's visual rhymes are delicious. Each feather of the shuttlecock, for instance, repeats some element of her appearance. White feathers repeat the white of her apron; a blue feather picks up the blue of her ribbon; a pink feather, the color of her cheek. It is as perfectly made as any sonnet. It makes you realize what rewards can flow from Chardin's desire to link the appearance of spontaneous feeling with the discreet display of its opposite, a technical perfection whose integrity rises from knowing its own limits. "All through his life," writes curator Pierre Rosenberg in the catalog, "Chardin battled to overcome his lack of natural talent." He is still an irrefutable proof that it isn't only virtuosos who change art history.