Taking Time at Waddesdon Manor is an enlightening experience. Elegantly curated by Juliet Carey, this compact exhibition is composed around the four known versions of Jean-Siméon Chardin’s Boy Building a House of Cards, which are brought together here for the first time, along with a selection of other genre paintings by Chardin and the reproductive prints that they inspired. Prompted by the recent purchase of one of the four House of Cards paintings by the Rothschild family, Waddesdon have seized this opportunity to explore productively the artistic interests and working methods of one of the most enigmatic artists of eighteenth-century France.

Contained within a single room, the exhibition’s size is no hindrance to its intentions but rather creates a felicitous space in which to encounter the intimacy of the interiors evoked in the works displayed. Along the main wall, the four House of Cards paintings are hung side-by-side emphasising the seriality in Chardin’s practice by prompting a mode of viewing that invites comparison. While Chardin often copied successful compositions, this is not the motivation at work in the House of Cards paintings, which are (as comparison here makes evident) versions rather than copies: revisitings, reworkings, and rethinkings of a subject and its composition. Seen together in this way, Chardin’s paintings of a playful activity coerce the audience into their own game of spot-the-difference: minute changes to the figure that suggest differences in the boys’ ages; costume choices that suggest class differences; alterations to the setting that re-situate the scene; and changing objects on the table that invite attempts to code-break the symbolism contained within coins, tokens, and playing cards. This ‘line-up’ display activates an impulse to choose between the versions – to pick a favourite, as it were – a connoisseurial act perhaps comparable to the underlying choices and decisions made by the artist in this repetitive re-engagement with a formula.

Accompanying the four Houses of Cards are several other examples of Chardin’s genre paintings loaned from public and private collections in the UK, France, and the USA, among them some of his best-known works from this period of intense activity during the 1730s, such as A Lady Taking Tea (1735) and Girl with a Shuttlecock (1737). Again the display invites engagement with Chardin’s practice of seriality, repetition, and copying, posing pendants in relation to each other (like A Lady Taking Tea hung opposite its probable pair, the Rothschild House of Cards) and hanging copies above their originals (as with the two versions of The Scullery Maid (both 1738) and The Pot Boy (1736-38, 1737), though here the act of comparison was constrained somewhat by lighting and hanging height, making some of the works tantalisingly out of reach for close scrutiny). Close-looking is however possible and rewarded when it comes to the displays of prints arranged in cases below the paintings. Chardin’s genre paintings had important afterlives in printed reproduction, where the material translation and the adding of titles and descriptive verses could transform or resolve the otherwise elusive meanings of seemingly prosaic subject matter. Pierre Fillœul’s engraving of A Lady Taking Tea, for instance, turns a moment of everyday domesticity into a scene from an amorous narrative, its verse written as though from a suitor, yearning for the tea to sweeten the lady’s desire, while the lines of the engraver’s burin delineate more forcefully than the painter’s brush the so-invoked sugar pot behind the cup. Seeing the works in such close proximity, we can start to understand here the artistic relationship between original and copy, and between the collaborative agencies of painter and printmaker. An especially striking engagement is Antoine Marcenay de Ghuy’s four etchings of the Rothschild House of Cards executed in the 1760s. This set of small-scale reproductions intuitively plays through and with Chardin’s own iterative approach, as the amateur etcher revisits the composition via subtle tonal shifts, which, all mounted on a single album page, create a progression from a brightly lit interior to a shadowy space, as though the game were taking place across the course of the day.

With its compelling insistence on a particular way of looking at Chardin’s artistic practice, through its discerning selection of objects and considered pairings and comparisons in display, the exhibition encounter offers an experience of thought-provoking argumentation through visual evidence; indeed one is left with the feeling of having read a contemplative essay on the subject. It is no surprise then that the catalogue accompanying the show presents an accompaniment of insightful analyses and new research, raising and responding to questions about Chardin’s choice of subjects, his singular approach, and his works’ endurance as objects of artistic influence and connoisseurial interest. Beginning with a contextualising introduction by Juliet Carey, an intuitive essay by Katie Scott on the significance of the House of Cards as a subject for Chardin, and two enlightening essays on the collecting practices of the Rothschilds with regard to Chardin, written by Pauline Prévost-Marcilhacy and Pierre Rosenberg, the catalogue continues with extensive entries on all the works displayed. Accompanied by beautifully reproduced images, many with exquisite close details and illustrations of comparative visual material, this is both a sumptuous guide to the exhibition and a valuable contribution to Chardin scholarship in its own right.

The exhibition is set to give rise to further scholarly contributions to debates around Chardin’s works, methods, and influence in a colloquium being held on 14 July with papers to be presented by Colin Bailey, Emma Barker, John Chu, René Démoris, Charlotte Guichard, Anna Grundberg, Rachel Jacobs, and Humphrey Wine. This colloquium will mark the close of the exhibition, which is on display until 15 July.