Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin

While the court painters of Louis XV filled Paris with pink cherubs and flirtation, Chardin turned to a copper pot, a few eggs, a dead fish. In an age that prized the light and erotic, he built a career on the plainest things in the kitchen, painted so solidly you feel their weight and dull shine.

He worked slowly and exhibited little, but even Diderot, the sharp-tongued philosopher who reviewed the Salons, marvelled at how Chardin made mere paint read as substance, the bloom on a peach or the felt of a hat. His genre scenes are just as still: a boy building a house of cards, a governess brushing a child's coat, a servant back from the market pausing with her loaves.

Late in life his eyes weakened and oil paint troubled him, so he switched to pastel and made a handful of unsparing self-portraits, an old man in a nightcap with spectacles pushed up on his forehead. He had lodgings in the Louvre, then a royal palace, and died there in 1779, having spent his last years drawing his own face in coloured chalk.