Blind Beggar

A blind beggar appears in this work attributed to Chardin at the Harvard Art Museums with a date of 1650 — precisely forty-nine years before his birth in 1699, making the attribution and date combination impossible as given. The Harvard painting may represent a misattribution to Chardin of a work by another French or Dutch genre painter, or the date may be significantly erroneous. If the work is genuinely by Chardin, it would date from between roughly 1720 and 1779, and the subject — a street beggar rather than his characteristic domestic interiors — would represent an unusual departure from his established genre. The Harvard Art Museums' collection of French paintings provides an important North American resource for studying seventeenth and eighteenth-century French genre subjects.

The figure of the beggar, if by Chardin, would represent an unusual subject requiring different handling from his typical domestic scenes. The genre treatment of poverty belongs to a different tradition from Chardin's characteristic subjects. The attribution and dating questions add art-historical interest beyond the painting's intrinsic qualities.