Jean Siméon Chardin, November 2, 1699 – December 6, 1779, was a French painter born in Paris, the son of a billiard-table maker. He trained in the studios of Pierre-Jacques Cazes and Noël-Nicolas Coypel and became a master painter in the Académie de Saint-Luc in 1724.

In 1728 Chardin was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture as a painter of animals and fruits. He worked principally in still life and domestic genre painting, exhibited at the Salon from 1737, and received lodgings in the Louvre from Louis XV in 1757.

In his final decade Chardin increasingly worked in pastel, producing portraits and self-portraits. He died in the Louvre in Paris in 1779; his work is held by the Louvre Museum, National Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, and other major collections.