Watteau, Antoine

▪ French painter

Introduction

born Oct. 10, 1684, Valenciennes, Fr.

died July 18, 1721, Nogent-sur-Marne

      French painter who typified the lyrically charming and graceful style of the Rococo. Much of his work reflects the influence of the commedia dell'arte and the opéra ballet (e.g., “The French Comedy,” 1716).

Early life and training.

      Antoine Watteau was the son of a roof tiler. According to early biographers his childhood was an unhappy one. As a boy he was sensitive and susceptible to quick changes of mood, a voracious reader of novels, and an avid music lover. He showed a penchant for making life studies of mountebanks performing on the public square, and his parents placed him in the workshop of a local painter. At about the age of 18, Watteau decided to go to Paris, where he arrived penniless and apprenticed himself to an old painter, Métayer. Work was scarce, however, so young Watteau moved on to a position in a workshop specializing in votive paintings. Meanwhile, he made countless sketches from life, which were to be a source of thematic inspiration to him for the rest of his life. It was at this time that he made the acquaintance of the art dealers Jean and Pierre-Jean Mariette, in whose shop he admired a precious collection of drawings and engravings, including some by the etcher Jacques Callot. There, in about 1703, he also met his new teacher, Claude Gillot (Gillot, Claude).

      Gillot was a decorator of theatrical scenery, with a great talent for painting grotesques, fauns, satyrs, and scènes d'opéra. He detested the grandiose official art of his own time, preferring to work in the style of the 16th-century school of Fontainebleau, with its free feminine grace. Gillot also painted subjects from the Italian commedia dell'arte, whose actors had been expelled from France only a few years before. Gillot's taste for these subjects, as well as some features of his drawing style, are reflected in Watteau's work. He began to observe the theatre from the wings: the makeup, the machines, the settings—all that serves to create scenic illusion. He discovered a new sense of light in the colourful reflections of artificial illumination on deep shadows, on made-up faces, on the brilliant costumes, and on the painted backdrops. The spectacle being staged was born of the equilibrium established among these elements; natural reality could scarcely have taught the young Watteau more.

      In 1708 Watteau entered the studio of Claude Audran III, then curator of the Medici Gallery in the Palais du Luxembourg, in Paris. Now his experience of Paris was virtually complete—the world of the theatre, the grand gardens of the Luxembourg, the study of art collections. Watteau's Paris is a combination of ceremonies and illusions, a miracle of civilization that reveals itself in its avenues and fountains, with their marvellous play of water amid the gardens. At the Luxembourg he studied the triumphant cycle of paintings that Rubens (Rubens, Peter Paul) had dedicated to Marie de Médicis about 30 years earlier. These huge works, vibrant with life and pleasure, exerted a deep influence upon him. Watteau assisted Audran, who was the most famous decorator in Paris, but he also looked to other worlds. In 1709 he was accepted as a student at the Académie Royale of painting and entered the competition for the Prix de Rome, but he failed to win the scholarship to Rome and decided to return to Valenciennes. A friend sold a painting of his so that Watteau could pay for the return journey. He was to paint others at Valenciennes for one of his admirers, a wounded officer in convalescence there. These subjects (“Les Fatigues de la guerre,” “Les Délassements de la guerre”) found favour with the public. In 1710 Watteau returned to Paris as the guest of the art dealer Pierre Sirois, who, together with Sirois's son-in-law Gersaint, was to be his faithful friend for the rest of his life. Watteau introduced members of the Sirois family into his paintings. He was not a portrait painter, however. His subjects do not seem to have names: they are at times friends who masquerade and pose for the groups of Italian actors.

Watteau's Cythera.

      In 1712 Watteau tried once more to go to Italy. He did not succeed, but he was accepted by the Académie as a painter of fêtes galantes—outdoor entertainments in which the courtiers often dressed in rural costumes—for his presentation of a scene depicting actors in a garden. Between 1710 and 1712 he had painted the first of his three versions of the “L'Embarquement pour l'île de Cythère.” The myth of the island of Cythera, or of love, has distant roots in French and Italian culture, in which the journey is depicted as a difficult quest. Watteau's Cythera, by comparison, is a paradise wavering in the ephemeral and in artifice; it represents an invitation to delights amid the enchantment of nature. It is an island toward which the pilgrims embark but never arrive, preserving it preserves its light only if it remains far on the horizon.

      Watteau's first version of the subject is anecdotal: it illustrates a comedy motif in a vaguely Venetian ambience. The second—which is the most beautiful—has the aspect of a profane ritual in an unreal, immense, and almost frighteningly empty landscape. In the third, in which cherubim flutter around a golden gondola, the subject has become vulgarized. Common to all three versions is a theatrical, almost scenographic, composition, a chromatic transposition of all that is suggested in the theatrical universe. The wonderlands of opera, romance, and epic are all evoked by Watteau's Cythera, which represents the country of the impossible dream, the revenge of madness on reason, and of freedom on rules and morality. According to one hypothesis, the theme was suggested to Watteau by a prose play, Les Trois Cousines (1700), by Florent Dancourt, in the finale of which a group of country youths, disguised as pilgrims of love, prepare to embark on the voyage to the island of Cythera. Since this story of rustic millers is parodistic in intent and quite different from the refined scene that Watteau set in an unreal Venice, it is more probable that Watteau was inspired by an opéra ballet of Houdar de la Motte, La Vénitienne (1705), in which the invitation to the island of love includes not only the pilgrims of Cythera but also the stock characters of the commedia dell'arte—that is, both of the great themes that Watteau pursued all his life.

Period of his major works.

      Despite his growing fame, Watteau remained shy, misanthropic, dissatisfied with himself, “libertine in spirit, but prudent in morals.” There is little information concerning him from 1712 until 1715, when he was introduced to the very rich financier Pierre Crozat, who had just returned from Italy. There, on behalf of the Regent, Crozat had been negotiating for the acquisition of Queen Christina's art collection. A Watteau enthusiast, Crozat invited the painter to take up quarters in his residence, as was the custom among wealthy art lovers. Crozat had a great collection of Italian and Flemish paintings and drawings, including Correggio, the Venetian masters, and Van Dyck, and as Crozat's guest, Watteau profitably applied the lessons of the Italian masters. He also painted the gardens and the countrysides surrounding the villa at Montmorency. Watteau left his rich patron out of a desire for freedom, although he remained his friend. Thenceforth he lived in seclusion and solitude. This was the period of the birth of his masterpieces: the “Conversations,” the “Divertissements champêtres,” the “Fêtes galantes.” In 1717 he presented to the Académie, of which he had become a member, the second version of “L'Embarquement pour l'île de Cythère.” Two years later he was in London, where his works were in great demand and where he also wanted to consult a famous physician about his health, which had been failing for some time. In London he limited himself to executing very few paintings, one of which was for his doctor on a subject very dear to him, “Italian Comedians.”

      Hardly a year later, in 1720, Watteau was back in France. In only eight days he painted the now-famous signboard for the shop of his art dealer friend Gersaint. Among his last works was “Gilles,” a portrait of a clown in white painted as a signboard for the Théâtre de la Foire. White as innocence (or imbecility) and roseate in complexion, “Gilles” is the image of the actor during intermission—the actor who offers himself every day to the laughter of his fellows, the uncomprehending victim of a ceremony the full meaning of which seems to evade him. He is represented in a grandness that recalls Rembrandt's “Christ Presented to the People” (“Ecce Homo”). At the other extreme is the signboard that Watteau painted for Gersaint: it portrays an art dealer's shop in which a morose painting of Louis XIV is being symbolically stored away, as if to mark the end of his great reign. Although there are a number of figures, the protagonist of the picture is painting itself, as if Watteau at the end of his life were consecrating his art to eternity. By now Watteau was worn down by tuberculosis, and he died at the age of 37.

Themes and influences.

      Watteau's art exemplifies the profound influence of the theatre as a motif of inspiration on the painting of the 18th century. The strongest influence on his work was exercised not by solemn tragedy but by the most ephemeral theatrical forms. One major influence was the commedia dell'arte, in which words count significantly less than gestures, a theatre linked to the actor, who brings his own routines with him. Another influence was the opéra ballet, with its grand display of fleeting images embodied by the dance, the singing, the costumes, and the decorations. Watteau belonged to a period of reaction against the classicism of the preceding era, in which division of the arts and of the separation of styles had been strictly observed. An attempt was thus made to ennoble the genres previously considered inferior (farce, improvised comedy, the novel), and bold transpositions from one form of art to the other were ventured, as in the fusion of poetry, music, painting, and dance into the new genre of opera. In many cases Watteau's painting is a chromatic transposition of the world of the opera.

      Watteau interpreted his era in forms so delicate and evanescent that they seem to suggest the illnesses of the culture. In the quarrel that raged between ancients and moderns, Watteau seems instinctively to have sided with the moderns. For him antiquity and its great heroes were dead. His adoration of the present and its refined modernity, and fashion bordered on frivolousness. On the other hand, he rejected every form of picturesque realism. His conception of Parnassus, the home of the gods of ancient Greece, resembles the Paris of his time, which he often reduced to the dimensions of a stage. Watteau was immersed in the ephemeral. Women reign in his paintings. Men—cavaliers or clowns—are there to please the women who glide by, enfolded in their splendid silken raiments. The statues in the parks are almost always statues of women. And even nature is feminine: trees with slender trunks, rich with a soft and uncertain foliage.

Posthumous reputation.

      Watteau's circle of admirers dissolved shortly after his death, and his reputation began to wane. Watteau, who had interpreted the deepest aspirations of his own time, was found pleasing by few later in the 18th century as the Age of Reason developed. Painting then passed to the observation of reality and, finally, to social protest. It was natural that an artist, such as Watteau, who exalted the free reign of fantasy was set aside. Critics later, during the French Revolution, accused Watteau of “having infected the dwellings of his time with bad taste.”

      The 19th century marked a certain resurgence of interest in Watteau, especially in England and among some French poets, namely Victor Hugo, Gérard de Nerval, and Théophile Gautier. Gradually, his fortunes revived: Baudelaire (Baudelaire, Charles) presented a profound and precise interpretation of the artist, placing him among the “beacons” of mankind in one of his most famous poems (“Les Phares,” 1855). He too saw Watteau's art against the background of the comédie-ballet as a whirling and weightless dance among popular stock characters or aristocratic cavaliers under the artificial lights of chandeliers.

      In 1856 the Goncourt brothers published “Philosophie de Watteau,” in which they compared him to Rubens. Marcel Proust, at the end of the century, was among those who best sensed Watteau's greatness. Eventually the esteem Watteau enjoyed in the circle of art lovers, poets, and novelists extended to the broad public.

Giovanni Macchia

Additional Reading

The great critical studies of Watteau from the late 19th and early 20th centuries include Edmond de Goncourt, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, dessiné et gravé d'Antoine Watteau (1875); Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, L'Art du dix-huitième siècle, 3rd ed., rev. and enlarged, 2 vol. (1880–82); John W. Mollett, Watteau (1883); Emil Hannover, Antoine Watteau (1889), in German; Paul Mantz, Antoine Watteau (1892), in French; Claude Phillips, Antoine Watteau, new and rev. ed. (1907); Edgcumbe Staley (John Edgcumbe Staley), Watteau: Master-Painter of the “Fêtes galantes” (1901); Gabriel Séailles, Watteau (1901, reissued 1923), in French; E. Heinrich Zimmermann (ed.), Watteau: Des Meisters Werke in 182 Abbildungen (1912); Louis Gillet, Watteau: un grand maître du XVIII^e siècle, 4th ed. (1943); and Sacheverell Sitwell, Antoine Watteau (1925). For the great critical interest in the work of Watteau that arose among scholars after the 1920s, the following works should be consulted: Charles Kunstler, Watteau, l'enchanteur (1936); Gilbert W. Barker, Antoine Watteau (1939); A.E. Brinckmann, J.A. Watteau (1943), in German; René Huyghe and Hélène Adhémar, Watteau: sa vie, son oeuvre (1950); M. Gauthier, Watteau (1960; originally published in French, 1959); and René Huyghe, Watteau (1970; also published as Watteau's Universe, 1976; originally published in French, 1968). New interpretations of The Embarkation for Cythera have been proposed by Michael Levey, “The Real Theme of Watteau's Embarkation for Cytherea,” Burlington Magazine, 103:180–185 (1961); Giovanni Macchia and E.C. Montagni, L'opera completa di Watteau (1968); and Federico Zeri, Watteau: The Embarkment for Cythera (2000).Other important monographs include Anita Brookner, Watteau (1967, reissued 1985); Marianne Roland Michel, Watteau et sa génération (1968), and Watteau, an Artist of the Eighteenth Century (1984; originally published in French, 1984); and Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Pierre Rosenberg, and Nicole Parmantier, Watteau, 1684–1721 (1984). Works that examine Watteau's drawings are K.T. Parker, The Drawings of Antoine Watteau (1931, reprinted 1970); Jacques Bouchot-Sauphique, Les Dessins de Watteau (1953); K.T. Parker and J. Mathey, Antoine Watteau: catalogue complet de son oeuvre dessiné, 2 vol. (1957–58); Pierre Schneider, The World of Watteau, 1684–1721, rev. ed. (1977, reissued 1981); Malcolm Cormack, The Drawings of Watteau (1970); Martin P. Eidelberg, Watteau's Drawings: Their Use and Significance (1977); Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, Antoine Watteau, 1684–1721: catalogue raisonné des dessins, 3 vol. (1996); and Alan Wintermute, Watteau and His World: French Drawing from 1700 to 1750 (1999), an exhibition catalogue.Other late 20th and early 21st century considerations of Watteau include Humphrey Wine, Watteau (1992), a biography; Mary Vidal, Watteau's Painted Conversations: Art, Literature, and Talk in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France (1992); Julie Anne Plax, Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France (2000); Helmut Börsch-Supan, Antoine Watteau, 1684–1721 (2000; originally published in German, 2000); and Mary D. Sheriff (ed.), Antoine Watteau: Perspectives on the Artist and the Culture of His Time (2006).

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