Antoine Watteau

For more information on Jean- Antoine Watteau, visit Britannica.com.

(b Valenciennes, bapt 10 Oct 1684; d Nogent-sur-Marne, nr Paris, 18 July 1721). He is best known for his invention of a new genre, the f?te galante, a small easel painting in which elegant people are depicted in conversation or music-making in a secluded parkland setting (see under F?TE CHAMP?TRE). His particular originality lies in the generally restrained nature of the amorous exchanges of his characters, which are conveyed as much by glance as by gesture, and in his mingling of figures in contemporary dress with others in theatrical costume, thus blurring references to both time and place.

Watteau's work was widely collected during his lifetime and influenced a number of other painters in the decades following his death, especially in France and England. His drawings were particularly admired. Documented facts about Watteau's life are notoriously few, though several friends wrote about him after his death (see Champion). Of over two hundred paintings generally accepted as his work

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The French painter Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) was the catalyst of the Regency period of the rococo style. His painterly language is an elegant camouflage of strong emotion by kindly sentiments and gentle manners.

Antoine Watteau was born on Oct. 10, 1684, in Valenciennes, the son of a prosperous roof tiler. Because Antoine was the second son, his parents did not oppose his training with the local religious painter J. A. Gérin. When Watteau was about 18, nevertheless, his father declined to continue paying for his apprenticeship, and the youth moved to Paris, where he made his way copying paintings for dealers.

It was probably through Pierre and Jean Mariette, dealers in engravings, that he met in 1703 Jean's cousin, the painter Claude Gillot, designer of costumes and stage sets inspired by themes from the Italian commedia dell'arte, a troupe of traveling actors noted for satirical improvisation. They had been banished from France since 1697, when they had imprudently staged La Fausse Prude, a parody, it seemed, upon Madame de Maintenon, King Louis XIV's second wife. This pious woman exercised considerable influence over the King and delayed the natural evolution of the arts until his death in 1715, when all of France, including Watteau, who had previously functioned largely as a decorator and painter of small genre scenes, went on a holiday of unconstrained creativity.

Watteau worked with Gillot until 1707/1708, when a professional rivalry developed, and Watteau went to work with Claude Audran III for about two years. Audran was a great decorator, and Watteau is known to have assisted in some of his commissions for the King. Through Audran he mastered his quick, supple line and his feathery brushstroke for foliage, figures, and facial accents. Audran was also the curator of the Medici Gallery of the Luxembourg Palace, which contained the celebrated series of paintings of the life of Marie de Médicis by Peter Paul Rubens, whose art had a profound influence upon Watteau.

After Watteau won second place in the Royal Academy's competition for the Prix de Rome in 1709, he returned to Valenciennes for a brief visit and then brought with him to Paris a young colleague, the artist Jean Baptiste Pater, who followed, almost slavishly, Watteau's style and themes, especially the military subjects Watteau was painting during this period. The landscape and figure sketches Watteau made at this time constituted a repertory of motifs which served him thereafter for his paintings, the arbitrary compositions of which precluded the necessity of his observing nature directly.

In 1712, on the recommendation of Charles de La Fosse and Antoine Coypel, Watteau became an associate member of the academy. His presentation piece was the painting Les Jaloux, known only from an engraving. La Fosse introduced Watteau to the financier and art collector Pierre Crozat, who invited Watteau to stay with him in 1715 at his country place at Montmorency, which housed a superb collection of Flemish and Venetian paintings and drawings, including works by Titian, Domenico Campagnola, and Paolo Veronese. Close study of these masterworks instantly inspired Watteau's most notable theme, the fêtes galantes, which represent the pleasures of country life enjoyed by Paris society during the Regency.

Works like Watteau's Musical Party, probably representing Crozat's friends amusing themselves in the park at Montmorency, are less turbulent than works of his previous period like the Accordée de village and though more polite, reminiscent of the blooming conviviality of Rubens's Garden of Love. Gallantry and splendid refinement of manners and dress perfume these pastoral scenes of Watteau; demure gesture and physiognomical charm alone reveal the emotional intensity experienced by prospective young lovers, who register in infinite variety the first shock of infatuation. Watteau's sensitivity to nuance, in the gamut of amorous emotions, apparent in these group compositions and isolated in works representing single figures, such as L'Indifférent, bespeaks the shy lover in love with love, ever at dalliance but seemingly incapable of gratification.

In 1717 Watteau became a member of the academy. His diploma piece was the Embarkation for Cythera (later he made another version of it). This work was officially qualified as a fête galante and the artist as a painter of fêtes galantes.

Though Watteau is reputed to have been of a nervous and impatient nature, little is really known of him except that he was indifferent to money, devoted to his art, delicate in health, retiring, discreet with women, and always surrounded by a few loyal friends. The frequent changes of residence or studio in which he worked is perhaps attributable not only to restlessness of temperament but also to carelessness of bachelor habits, apparent in his untidy painting techniques, occasioning the deterioration of a number of his most prized works. In 1711 he had lived in Paris with his close friend, the art dealer Pierre Sirois, where, seeking a less social milieu than that found with Crozat, he returned in 1715/1716. Between 1716 and 1719 Watteau resided with Nicolas Vleughels in Paris, when he painted many of his masterpieces.

Watteau's painting Gilles (ca. 1719) seemingly deals with two levels of thought, the worldly and the philosophical. Glamorous actors with sensuous faces and fanciful hats amuse themselves by teasing a donkey ridden by a grinning jackanapes dressed in black who leers provocatively at the observer as if eager for recognition. The pagan god Pan is represented as a herm figure in profile with closed eyes. In front of the actors, raised on an eminence, looms their fellow player Gilles, like an immemorial Pagliacci, alone and ludicrous. Dressed in white satin, with his head set off against the blue sky by a hat rounded like a nimbus, Gilles mutely awaits a cue that is not given here. The world of his cohorts is unaware of his overwhelming awareness. Only the donkey seems to know what Gilles, in fact, Watteau, knows, and their eyes solemnly meet the observer's.

In 1719 Watteau went to London, possibly to consult the noted physician Richard Mead, who became his patron and friend. The rigors of the London winter are said to have undermined Watteau's health. During his brief sojourn there he met artists of the French colony, who passed on his style; thus Watteau profoundly influenced the course of 18th-century painting in England.

On Watteau's return to Paris in 1720 he lodged with E. F. Gersaint, Sirois's son-in-law, for whom he painted the famous signboard known as the Enseigne de Gersaint which hung outside the picture dealer's shop. This work is remarkable for the painterly spontaneity with which it was executed, presumably within a very few days, its diminutive figure scale, and the graceful informality of genre realism typifying the modern style which Watteau helped to create. Because of increasing ill health, he moved to Nogent-sur-Marne, where he died on July 18, 1721. His last work, The Halt during the Chase, is uncoordinated and in particularly poor condition, indicative, no doubt, of the artist's final illness.

Of the approximately 300 paintings executed by Watteau between 1704 and 1721, none is signed or dated, making the establishment of a chronological development purely conjectural. Most of these works were engraved under the direction of Jean de Jullienne between 1721 and 1735.

Further Reading

Previous to Karl T. Parker's pioneering book, The Drawings of Antoine Watteau (1932), many Watteau drawings were scattered and known only from the Jean de Jullienne engravings. Though their art-historical scholarship is far from negligible, the essay on Watteau by Edmond and Jules Goncourt in their French XVIII Century Painters: Watteau, Boucher, Chardin, Latour Greuze, Fragonard, edited by Robin Ironside (trans. 1948), is important humanistic literature; as a verbal reincarnation of the 18th-century spirit, it should it should not be missed. More recent studies of Watteau include Anita Brookner, Watteau (1967); Pierre Schneider, The World of Watteau, 1684-1721 (1967); and René Huyghe, Watteau (1968; trans. 1970). See also François Fosca, The Eighteenth Century: Watteau to Tiepolo (1952).

Additional Sources

Posner, Donald, Antoine Watteau, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Wine, Humphrey, Watteau, London: Scala Books; New York, NY: Distributed in the USA and Canada by Rizzoli International Publications, 1992.

Watteau, Antoine (1684-1721). French painter. In 1702 Watteau was introduced to the theatre by Claude Gillot, illustrator of subjects from theatrical productions. He studied the poetic works of the great Venetians of the 16th and 17th c. in French collections and developed their ideas of the close association of the arts of music, dance, and painting. His subjects range from direct transcriptions of stagesets like The Embarkation for Cythère (1712) and From Cythère (1717), derived from Les Trois Cousins by Dancourt, to studies and portraits of named actors such as Philippe Poussin, or anonymous groups of actors in costume off-stage, relaxing, and of friends dressed up. Of great historical interest are paintings of events associated with the theatre like The Italian Comedians Leaving Paris [see Comédie-Italienne]. His two principal pupils, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Pater (1696-1736) and Nicolas Lancret (1690-1743), continued to paint fêtes galantes and personalities from the theatrical world.

[Patsy Campbell]

Watteau, Antoine (born Jean-Antoine; 1689–1721), French painter. Antoine Watteau was born in Valenciennes in northern France in humble circumstances. By the end of his short life (he died at 32 of tuberculosis), he was a celebrated painter in Paris. Today, he is generally considered to be the father of the rococo style because he developed the fête galante, 'gallant party', as a subject; it became a hallmark of the era's painting. Watteau's work in particular, and the rococo style in general, reflect a major transformation of the French art world. At the beginning of Watteau's lifetime, King Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) controlled the production of culture through the establishment of academies and state-supported patronage of the arts. By the time of his death, patronage of the arts had shifted to private individuals who were no longer interested in the highly didactic and often propagandistic art demanded by royal patronage. Although Watteau was a member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, it was a group of private collectors who collected his work and cultivated his reputation.

The fêtes galantes were contemporary scenes of elegant men and women, usually in an outdoor setting and sometimes dressed in masquerade, engaged in conversation, flirtation, music making, and dancing. Watteau's fêtes galantes were intimate in scale; the pictures were the appropriate size to be enjoyed in a private space, rather than the monumental paintings of subjects taken from classical mythology and history that decorated the public spaces of Louis XIV's palaces. The fêtes galantes mirrored the kinds of social activities enjoyed by Watteau's elite collectors and also reinforced their image of themselves.

The appearance of some figures dressed in theatrical costumes and others in contemporary everyday garb is another trait of Watteau's fêtes galantes. Watteau absorbed the theatrical milieu under the tutelage of his first teacher in Paris, Claude Gillot (1673–1722), who illustrated theatrical troupes. Claude Audran (1658–1734), who did decorative painting in the homes of Parisian high society, taught Watteau his highly ornamental style and introduced him to his future patrons. Watteau himself later had two students, Nicolas Lancret and Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Pater, who also specialized in fêtes galantes.

Perhaps Watteau's most famous fête galante is Pilgrimage to Cythera (1717, Louvre). The painting represents a lighthearted topic that was popular in theatrical and musical performance—a pilgrimage to Venus's Island of Cythera, where everyone would fall in love. In Watteau's painting, a statue of Venus indicates the pilgrims are on the island of Cythera. Three couples are arranged on a hillock and this can be read as a narrative of departure. The couple closest to the statue is most fully under Venus's spell of love; the next couple to the left is getting up, emerging from the spell of love; and the third couple is already standing. The woman glances back, as if wistfully remembering the spell of love already gone. On the other side of the hillock, a group of people heads toward a boat. Their pilgrimage is over and they will return to the real world. Watteau's fêtes galantes have often been characterized as melancholy, containing a subtext that alludes to the passing of love and of life.

The passing of the era of King Louis XIV is represented in another of his celebrated works, The Signboard of Gersaint (1721, Staatliche Museum, Berlin). This work shows the interior of the shop of Watteau's friend, the art dealer Edmé Gersaint. On the left side, workmen pack away a portrait of Louis XIV, and the walls are covered with paintings representative of an older style associated with his reign. On the right side, elegantly dressed customers admire paintings representative of the new, or rococo, style preferred by elite private patrons. This painting also celebrates the collection and enjoyment of art, which had become part of the social rituals enacted among the elite.

Watteau's paintings are often very witty. In The Signboard of Gersaint, the painting of Louis XIV being stored not only represents the passing of an era, but is also a visual pun, referring to the name of Gersaint's shop, "The Grand Monarch." In Pilgrimage to Cythera, the cherubs who flutter above the ship cavort erotically, perhaps acting out what the more decorous pilgrims below are thinking about. Wittiness, whether in art or in conversation, was a trait much esteemed in eighteenth-century high society.

Today, as in the eighteenth century, Watteau's works are highly prized. He managed to combine superb draftsmanship with deft painting to subtly represent facets of both the complex social life and the attitudes of those who came to dominate early modern European society.

Bibliography

Grasselli, Margaret, and Pierre Rosenberg, with the assistance of Nicole Parmantier. Watteau: 1684–1721. Washington, D.C., 1984.

Plax, Julie Anne. Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France. New York, 2000.

Posner, Donald. Antoine Watteau. Ithaca, N.Y., 1984.

Vidal, Mary. Watteau's Painted Conversations: Art, Literature, and Talk in 17th and 18th Century France. New Haven, 1992.

—JULIE ANNE PLAX

Watteau in the last year of his life, by Rosalba Carriera, 1721

Jean-Antoine Watteau (October 10, 1684 – July 18, 1721) was a French painter whose brief career spurred the revival of interest in colour and movement (in the tradition of Correggio and Rubens), and revitalized the waning Baroque idiom, which eventually became known as Rococo. He is credited with inventing the genre of fêtes galantes: scenes of bucolic and idyllic charm, suffused with an air of theatricality. Some of his best known subjects were drawn from the world of Italian comedy and ballet.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life and training 1.2 Career 2 Critical assessment and legacy 2.1 Lost painting found in country house 3 Family 4 References 5 Sources 6 External links

Biography

Early life and training

Pilgrimage on the Isle of Cythera, 1717, Louvre. Many commentators note that it depicts a departure from the island of Cythera, the birthplace of Venus, thus symbolizing the brevity of love.

Watteau was born in the town of Valenciennes, which had recently passed from the Spanish Netherlands to France. His father was a master tiler. Showing an early interest in painting, he was apprenticed to Jacques-Albert Gérin, a local painter. Having little to learn from Gérin, Watteau left for Paris in about 1702. There he found employment in a workshop at Pont Notre-Dame, making copies of popular genre paintings in the Flemish and Dutch tradition; it was in that period that he developed his characteristic sketchlike technique.

In 1703 he was employed as an assistant by the painter Claude Gillot, whose work represented a reaction against the turgid official art of Louis XIV's reign. In Gillot's studio Watteau became acquainted with the characters of the commedia dell'arte (its actors had been expelled from France several years before), a favorite subject of Gillot's that would become one of Watteau's lifelong passions. Afterward he moved to the workshop of Claude Audran III, an interior decorator, under whose influence he began to make drawings admired for their consummate elegance. Audran was the curator of the Palais du Luxembourg, where Watteau was able to see the magnificent series of canvases painted by Peter Paul Rubens for Queen Marie de Medici. The Flemish painter would become one of his major influences, together with the Venetian masters he would later study in the collection of his patron and friend, the banker Pierre Crozat.

Career

Pilgrimage to Cythera is an embellished repetition of his painting of 1717, and exemplifies the frivolity and sensuousness of Rococo painting. (1721, Berlin)

In 1709 Watteau tried to obtain the Prix de Rome and was rejected by the Academy. In 1712 he tried again and was considered so good that, rather than receiving the one-year stay in Rome for which he had applied, he was accepted as a full member of the Academy. He took five years to deliver the required "reception piece," but it was one of his masterpieces: the Pilgrimage to Cythera, also called the Embarkation for Cythera.

Interestingly, while Watteau's paintings seem to epitomize the aristocratic elegance of the Régence (though he actually lived most of his short life under the oppressive climate of Louis XIV's later reign), he never had aristocratic patrons. His buyers were bourgeois such as bankers and dealers.

Although his mature paintings seem to be so many depictions of frivolous fêtes galantes, they in fact display a sober melancholy, a sense of the ultimate futility of life, that makes him, among 18th century painters, one of the closest to modern sensibilities. His many imitators, such as Nicolas Lancret and Jean-Baptiste Pater, borrowed his themes but could not capture his spirit.

Among his most famous paintings, beside the two versions of the Pilgrimage to Cythera (one in the Louvre, the other in the Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin), are Pierrot (long identified as "Gilles"), Fêtes venitiennes, Love in the Italian Theater, Love in the French Theater, "Voulez-vous triompher des belles?" and Mezzetin. The subject of his hallmark painting, Pierrot or Gilles, with his slowly fading smile, seems a confused actor who appears to have forgotten his lines; he has materialized into the fearful reality of existence, sporting as his only armor the pathetic clown costume. The painting may be read as Watteau's wry comment on his mortal illness.

L'Enseigne de Gersaint (1720): In one of Watteau's last paintings, the portrait of Louis XIV and his own artworks are being packed away. The painter had no reason to expect that his name would be remembered long.

Watteau's final masterpiece, the Shop-sign of Gersaint[2], exits the pastoral forest locale for a mundane urban set of encounters. Painted at Watteau's own insistence, "to take the chill off his fingers", this sign for an art shop in Paris is effectively the final curtain of Watteau's theatre. It has been described as Watteau's Las Meninas, in that the theme appears to be the promotion of art. The scene is an art gallery where the façade has magically vanished. The gallery and street in the canvas are fused into one contiguous drama.

Watteau's commedia dell'arte player of Pierrot, ca 1718-19, traditionally identified as "Gilles" (Louvre)

Watteau alarmed his friends by a carelessness about his future and financial security, as if foreseeing he would not live for long. In fact he had been sickly and physically fragile since childhood. In 1720, he travelled to London, England to consult Dr Richard Mead, one of the most fashionable physicians of his time and an admirer of Watteau's work. However London's damp and smoky air offset any benefits of Dr. Mead's wholesome food and medicines. Watteau returned to France and spent his last few months on the estate of his patron, Abbé Haranger, where he died in 1721 perhaps from tuberculous laryngitis at the age of 36. The Abbé said Watteau was semi conscious and mute during his final days, clutching a paint brush and painting imaginary paintings in the air.^[1]

La Boudeuse from the Hermitage Museum: "Flirting coquettishly yet innocently, the artist's imaginary heroes – the deliberately indifferent lady and her insistently attentive cavalier – are shown with gentle irony. Their fragile, elegant world is dominated by a lyrical mood with just a touch of elegiac melancholy."[1].

Critical assessment and legacy

Little known during his lifetime beyond a small circle of his devotees, Watteau "was mentioned but seldom in contemporary art criticism and then usually reprovingly".^[2] Sir Michael Levey once noted that Watteau "created, unwittingly, the concept of the individualistic artist loyal to himself, and himself alone". If his immediate followers (Lancret and Pater) would depict the unabashed frillery of aristocratic romantic pursuits, Watteau in a few masterpieces anticipates an art about art, the world of art as seen through the eyes of an artist. In contrast to the Rococo whimsicality and licentiousness cultivated by Boucher and Fragonard in the later part of Louis XV's reign, Watteau's theatrical panache is usually tinged with a note of sympathy, wistfulness, and sadness at the transience of love and other earthly delights.

Watteau's influence on the arts (not only painting, but the decorative arts, costume, film, poetry, music) was more extensive than that of almost any other 18th-century artist. According to the 1911 Britannica, "in his treatment of the landscape background and of the atmospheric surroundings of the figures can be found the germs of Impressionism". The Watteau dress, a long, sacklike dress with loose pleats hanging from the shoulder at the back, similar to those worn by many of the women in his paintings, is named after him. A revived vogue for Watteau began in Europe during the Victorian era and was later encapsulated by the Goncourt brothers and the World of Art. In 1984 Watteau societies were created in Paris and London. Since 2000 a Watteau centre has been established at Valenciennes.

Lost painting found in country house

La Surprise, painted around 1718, was known only through a copy in the Royal Collection before the original was found during a routine insurance valuation in 2007. The oil painting shows an actor playing a guitar on a stone bench looking across at a couple locked in an amorous embrace. The action is watched by a small dog in the corner. The painting was sold at auction on July 8, 2008 for 15 million Euros; this set a world record price for a painting by Watteau.

Family

The son (Louis Joseph Watteau) and grandson (François-Louis-Joseph Watteau) of Antoine's brother Noël Joseph Watteau (1689-1756) both also became painters.

References

1. ^ Dormandy, Thomas. "The white death: the history of tuberculosis". New York University Press, 2000. p.11.
2. ^ Arnold Hauser. Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism. Routledge (UK), 1999. P. 21.

Sources

• Dormandy, Thomas. "The White Death: the History of Tuberculosis". New York University Press, 2000.
• Levey, Michael, Rococo to Revolution. Thames and Hudson, 1966.
• Roland Michel, Marianne, Watteau. Flammarion, 1984.
• Schneider, Pierre, The World of Watteau. Time-Life Books, 1967.
• <http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23433317-5005961,00.html>

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Antoine Watteau

• www.Jean-Antoine-Watteau.org 89 works by Antoine Watteau
• Watteau paintings at the Web Gallery of Art
• The Pleasure of Watteau Julian Bell on Watteau from The New York Review of Books

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)