If I were asked what new thing Watteau gave to the world, I would answer that hehumanised the art of his country and century, and drew men from pomposity to his own intimate and dream-like reality under the symbols of gallantry and masquerade. He was also the pioneer of impressionism, the discoverer of the decomposition of tones, and the link, to quote M. Mauclair, that connects Ruysdael and Claude Lorrain with Turner, Monticelli, and Claude Monet.
The eighteenth century in France which he inaugurated is a sunlit garden full of flowers compared to a cold court in some prison palace, to which the seventeenth century of academic imitation of the lesser Italians may be likened. Correct, pompous, lifeless, Le Brun, Le Sueur, and his other forerunners, have left us little but a sense of boredom, a warning how not to paint, and the assurance that, unless a school is founded on a personal study of Nature, that school dies with its founder. The decadence of Italian art is said to date from Raphael. Certain it is that bombastic art dates from the greatest artist—Michelangelo. The father of the chromo is Correggio.
Watteau, a "little master," as some are pleased to call him, has had an influence onart that persists to-day, an influence intimate and human. Certainly he made life more beautiful. Departing for Cythera with Watteau's dames and gallants means more to us of intelligence in art than acres of classic pictures of gods, temples and heroes untouched by the warmth of personality and incisiveness of observation. We are fatigued and unconvinced in the rooms at the Louvre devoted to Le Sueur's series of pictures depicting the life of St. Bruno. We are glad before the little earnest portraits of Corneille, Clouet, and Fouquet hanging in the next room. The love of beauty and the simple religion of the Primitives is transferred to us. We feel it to be true that "Nothing can wash the balm from an anointed king," in looking at the portrait of Charles I., king, dandy, and gentleman, touched as it is with Van Dyck's great gift of personal vision; but Le Sueur and Le Brun say nothing, except perhaps to make us grudge the wall space their pictures occupy.
Watteau is the lure that led France back to Nature; his real-unreal pleasances are the gardens where grew the flowers (slips from older stock, if you will) called Modern Movement,Impressionism, and Pointillism. "The Embarkment for Cythera" has been called the first impressionist picture. Once again through Watteau the natural art of the North prevailed over the art of the South as in the time of the Burgundian Franco-Flemish renaissance.
Watteau is true successor to his masters Teniers and Rubens. Teniers' subjects may be said to persist to the end of his short but full artistic life, and hisFêtes Galantes, those perfect expressions of his matured art, are Teniers' subjects made his own; but the uncouth Flemish peasants become graceful dames and gallants. Teniers' boors rollick through the day and night boisterously, leaving nothing for to-morrow, unless it be a headache. Watteau's dames and gallants are touched with happy melancholy. Their light malady of heartache for unattained desires is obviously more beautiful pictorially than the headaches of hilarious boors.
Your true artist has delicateantennæand is sensitive to everything that he sees and feels; but when he retires within himself, the memory of all that he felt, of warmth or cold,fine or unfine, returns to him. The influence of many men Watteau felt. I place them in the order of their influence—Teniers, Rubens, Gillot, Audran, Titian, and Veronese. The example of each taught him something, but the artist in him selected ingredients of their genius and combined them into a new and original one—his own.
The wholesome influence of Rubens on painters has been enormous. He did not make imitators, but he inspired many great men to "get the look of their own eyes," not the look of his; robust, normal, and generous of nature, the contagion of his truth is so immediate that all who come in contact with it must look at Nature unblinkingly, and receive a fresh impulse from his bravery. Velazquez was a better painter after he had talked and worked on the hillside above the Escorial with Rubens; Van Dyck was his pupil, and Watteau is of his artistic progeny. The feminine taste of Velazquez, Van Dyck, and Watteau was made more virile by contact with Rubens, whose taste many of us may condemn, and whose influence for good we are so apt to overlook.
From Titian Watteau borrowed warmth,and from Veronese coolness of colour; Gillot, the decorative painter, showed him his own inherent power; Audran, too, helped him, and the Luxembourg Gardens and Gallery aided his artistic development.
No doubt the great artist might be shut in a cell, and still his genius would bring forth its work unnourished by influence or propinquity to other talents; it might even show a rarer quality. But ninety-nine in a hundred derive from their forebears, and it is interesting to follow the career of a great man, to pursue the influences that formed him, and to see in the end how his individuality asserted itself. It were churlish in any student and lover of Watteau not to know and acknowledge the happy effect upon him of the masters he admired.
Watteau was of Flemish origin, for Valenciennes, where he was born, became French only seven years before his birth. Conquest cannot in seven years change the characteristics of a people. Watteau's art is consequently distinctly Flemish, but modified by French taste; he became an artistic composite of Flemish technical sanity and French intelligenceand fervour. He was an exotic that shot up in the forcing-house of his exacting genius, extracting vitality from Rubens the fertiliser, inspiration from Teniers, colour from Titian and Veronese, and encouragement from Gillot and Audran. Genius is a great gift lent by Nature to the few; but Nature is inexorable in demanding the return of the fruits of the gift, as if man were but a casket for its safe keeping; when the end comes he must have proved his worth as custodian, be the time long, as in the case of a Da Vinci or a Michaelangelo, or short, as in the case of a Raphael or a Watteau.
The shorter the time given for the justification of the gift the stronger often is the capacity for effort, so that the sum total of the achievement of the short life often seems to exceed that of the long life.
Michaelangelo lived to be very old. When this "greatest artist" died he left his work unfinished. Raphael died young, but his achievement was prodigious. Watteau's short sad life of illness and discontent produced more than twelve hundred items.
Watteau began his artistic career influencedin technique by thepetits toucheurs, the sympathetic little masters of the Netherlands to whom he was kin (M. de Julienne calls him in his catalogue "peintre Flamand de L'Academie Royale"). Soon the big touch of Rubens intrudes and the technique broadens; next Titian obsesses him, and the shadows under the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens as he watches grow warmer to the watcher, and colour begins to glow; Veronese intervenes, and cooler tones are apparent—and these three great masters of breadth and truth, of warmth and temperament, of chill stateliness, combine in the mind's eye of Watteau. The pleasant places in the gardens of the Luxembourg are peopled with ladies and gallants and "little ladies" and "little gallants," and, as he walks and watches, Teniers' subjects flit across his vision, and the forms of Rubens' rosy and ample matrons.
How would Titian have painted yonder dark woman of the warm colour and deep red hair walking down the glade? The leaves on the trees rustle in the summer air. Light flickers on silken frocks, cold reflections on green. Something whispers to his discontent "paintthe scene as you see it," draw the lady sitting on the grass, her back toward you, in the shot silk frock of bronze and green, and the other standing near, tall and elegant, in rose and yellow. What colour is it? "The colour of a sun-browned wood-nymph's thigh." And her hands behind her back. What hands! "Hands must be better painted than heads, being more difficult."
Beyond in the gardens fountains and little children play; tall trees throw shadows on beauty pouting, the indifferent lover tip-toes away, not so indifferent as he would have the pouting one believe. There is movement toward the gates of the Palace Gardens; children run tripping over tiny dogs led by lute string ribbons; soldiers and music.
Watteau finds himself, not wholly perhaps, but the formative period has passed. The artist is made; is himself, gives himself. No longer will the classicists prevail; no longer will art be cold and eclectic. The youth from Valenciennes will call Paris back to Nature, and through a temperament will show the world familiar things, will let his imagination play, taking his good where he finds it, but resolving it into something that is his own. He will see with his own eyes. He will paint pictures as he pleases.
PLATE VII.—FÊTE CHAMPÊTRE(In the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)
Bleak Edinburgh is rich in the possession of this picture of dreamy colour. The hour is sunset; the place is where you will, but the title, "Fête Champêtre," suits the scene of dalliance quite as well as any other name; a similar picture at Dresden is called by M. Mauclair "The Terrace Party." You perceive here the typical Watteau figures, and behind is a landscape that has all the idealistic charm of his rendering of Nature.
When Watteau, perhaps unknown to himself, resolved to be himself, a new school was born in France, a school whose influence still prevails. We are fond of taking credit to ourselves for the initiation of the modern school of landscape. We remember with pride the day in 1824 when the French Salon was illumined with three of Constable's pictures; we also remember the acknowledgment by French painters of the inspiration of Turner and Bonnington; but it would be interesting to follow back their inspiration; and it would not be difficult to trace Monet's division of tones and envelope of air to Watteau.
Influence in art and inspiration is a ball that is tossed back and forth. If Constable, Turner, and Bonnington influenced the French school they owe allegiance to Watteau, and through him to "the bull in art," Rubens, who was master to Van Dyck, the founder of the English school.
Does Gainsborough's lovely "Perdita" in the Wallace Collection owe nothing of its exquisitefemininity, sweet melancholy, and woodland background, to Watteau? Constable and Turner were but paying old debts, for the painter of theFêtes Galanteshad shown the beauty of landscape and made it something more than a setting for figures. He taught also that Nature is intimate and familiar with accidental beauty of sunlight and twilight, misty horizons, and lovable little things near to us; not swept and garnished and coldly unreal, but a world where human beings may wander happily with Nature on a level with their own eyes; not a world where only Titans and gods roam through pseudo-classical scenes.
In Watteau's pictures poetry and reality dwell in harmony. He proved their compatibility; he showed that all the world is a vision seen through a temperament.
It is unjust to attribute to Watteau's influence only the frivolous school of painters which immediately followed him; they were incidents of the reaction of their time against the dull and the pedantic. They copied him, but they missed his sincerity; they lacked his genius; they were begotten of their age when dulness tired of being good and grew wanton. Buteven his followers have more of life and warmth and beauty than his predecessors, the frigid and attenuated school of Le Brun. Fragonard is a master and lives; we are rising to a new appreciation of him; and Pater and Lancret do not tire us even if they are "soulless Watteaus." Le Brun and his school are dead, and must one day be buried in the cellars of the Louvre to make way for their betters—the painters inspired by the Flemish Frenchman—Antoine Watteau—who made possible the modern school. From him Constable, Turner, Gainsborough, Corot, Manet and Monet derived. What an achievement for a short life of thirty-seven years!
Most critics of Watteau allow something of his rhythmic sense and beauty of colour to tinge their appreciations. Ordinary statements of facts seem inadequate to express the feeling he evokes, whether the writer be concerned with the "outwardness" of his genius, like the brothers De Goncourt, or the "inwardness" ofit, like M. Camille Mauclair. Instinctively language becomes flowery, and light and lovely words rise spontaneously to re-echo in another medium the music of his pictures.
According to our temperament and taste we are influenced by the familiar-and-candid friend standpoint of De Caylus; by the De Goncourts' searching analysis clothed in apt and sparkling words; by M. Camille Mauclair's soul-search into the effect on Watteau's life of the disease from which he suffered, or by the calm and cultivated mind of Walter Pater with its rare and sympathetic insight, and that "tact of omission" which he extolls in Watteau.
The source of all the biographies is the memoir of the Comte de Caylus, which was lost from the archives of the Academy, and discovered by the brothers De Goncourt in a second-hand book-shop. While we are grateful for the information De Caylus's memoir contains, we can but smile at the judgment of a friend and admirer on a contemporary so far in advance of his age as Watteau. Solemn De Caylus entirely failed to understand the real man and artist. Apart from the details he gives of Watteau's life, the passages which describehis method of work are the most interesting. He informs us that Watteau could never be an heroic or allegorical painter (thank Heaven!), not being trained academically; he also tells us that his reflections on painting were profound, and that his execution was inferior to his ideas; that he had no knowledge of anatomy, having hardly ever drawn from the nude, so that he neither understood it nor was able to express it. De Caylus also calls Watteau "mannered," but admits that he was endowed with charm, and so on, and so on. Watteau's nudes are studied, and, what is more, achieved. Recall any one of them, "The Toilet," "Antiope," "The Judgment of Paris"—they are as documentary as his drawings. The values and reflected lights of his nude bodies are academic enough to satisfy a modern student at Julian's, the most carping and exacting of critics.
De Caylus, while deploring Watteau's methods of technique, contributes the interesting information that he preferred to use his paints liquid; that he rubbed his pictures all over with oil and repainted over this surface; also that he was slovenly in his habits, rarely cleaning his palette, and allowing days to passwithout setting it afresh; that his pot of medium was full of dirt and dust and the sediment of used colours, and that he was idle and indolent.
Well, as to Watteau's methods, I prefer to think that the surface of oil while it mellows preserves also. The worst artists are often the most solicitous of their mediums, and the laborious industry of the mediocre painter is often laborious idleness. A man who can leave behind him, after a short life, the quality and quantity of work bequeathed to the world by Watteau refutes, by that work, accusations of indolence and idleness. Neither can I admit that he was mannered. His manner was different from the clique of painters then in vogue, and it is obvious that he had a manner, but this very manner is his originality. Of course his pictures are "invented," but invented from the accumulated facts of his own drawings, wrested from life hurriedly, for he had very little time, and yet showing no marks of haste. If, as M. Mauclair says, "There exists in intellectual consumptives a condition of mind which seems to concentrate all those preceptions of supreme delicacy conferred on noble minds bythe presentiment of approaching death," we need not grieve that the lives of such men as Keats, Watteau, and Schubert were short. "The body's disease caused a mystic exaltation in the soul, whose productions, far from being touched by debility or decadence, are rather the concentration of extreme power and violent emotion." This intelligent and sympathetic critic goes on to say that the very unwholesomeness of body is marked by "unmistakable health of mind," which may indeed be a "courageous facing of earthly finality," but is also a fertile field in which great enterprises are undertaken and achieved.
As I have said, according to your temperament you may take Watteau seriously, lightly, joyously or sadly. There is recompense whether you feel that he is the great and profound master M. Mauclair calls him, or whether you range yourself with the De Goncourts, who describe him as "a painter of Utopias, a beautifier, the most amiable and determined of liars, a painter of pictures where the fiddles of Lérida play marches that lead the way to death, where smart La Tulipe struts and swaggers, and Manon flirts between two gun shots, and ahost of little love-birds flutter, light-heartedly, into war's stern discipline."
The De Goncourts note that there is in Watteau's work "murmurs of vague and slow harmony behind the laughing words," and that a "musical sadness gently contagious exhales from theseFêtes Galantes. Like the seduction of Venice, I know not what veiled poetry breathes sweet and low to our charmed senses."
M. Mauclair asserts that no one has ever understood Watteau so well as Verlaine, and that "his exquisite little volume of poemsFêtes Galantesis an absolute transposition of the painter's work"; but it is the brilliant appreciation of the De Goncourts that has had the strongest influence on subsequent writers, so admirably do they reveal Watteau, so like the colour of his pictures are the colours of their words, so adequate is their exposition of one side of Watteau's fascination. They claim Watteau as the great poet of the eighteenth century, and then proceed to give in glittering prose a penetrating and persuasive criticism, apostrophising Watteau's art as "a country refreshed by fountains, decorated with marbles and statues, and peopled by naiades, a country lovable and radiant, far from a jealous world, where baskets of flowers swing from bending trees; where fields are full of music, gardens full of roses and tangled vines; a France where the pines of Italy grow, where villages are gay with weddings, coaches, ceremonies and festal attire, and violins and flutes conduct to atemple Jesuitethe marriage of Nature and the Opera."
PLATE VIII.—THE MUSIC LESSON(In the Wallace Collection)
Watteau, seemingly just for joy in the colour, trickles—there is no other word for it—one luscious colour over another, like liquid jewels embedded in gold. The colour fascinates. Is it rose and white? The man's garments are neither rose, nor white, nor yellow, and yet they are all three. The rose of the woman's rosette repeats the carmines of her complexion. The composition is charming.
"La Mode de Watteau—that divine tailor whose artist scissors have fashioned playfully the delight in disorder, the morningnégligé, and the beautiful ceremonious garments of the afternoon. Fairy scissors dowering the times to come with fashions from the 'Thousand and One Nights.' Beribboned scissors of Watteau, what a delightful realm of coquetry you cut from the bigoted realm of the Maintenon!"
How different in manner and method is Walter Pater's "Imaginary Portrait," called "A Prince of Court Painters: Extracts from an old French Journal." Calmly this subtle analysis begins, which shows a deeper insight into the personality of Watteau than either the brothers De Goncourt, or M. Mauclair, who callsPater's "Imaginary Portrait" a "whimsical interpretation." I have read many books about the painter of theFêtes Galantes, but I always return to Pater's "whimsical portrait," for it gives the very atmosphere of his artistic descent and development, from the age of seventeen to the last year of his life. Missing no dominant event, misusing no legends, cast in the form of a diary, the narrative is made convincingly real by Pater's sympathetic imagination.
These extracts are from an imaginary old French Journal, kept apparently by an elder sister of Jean Baptiste Pater, Watteau's pupil. This lonely and sensitive lady, who has evidently lost her cloistral heart to the unconcerned painter, is living in Valenciennes, Watteau's birthplace. The first entry is dated:—
"Valenciennes,September1701.
"They have been renovating my father's large workroom.... Among old Watteau's work-people came his son, 'the genius,' my father's godson and namesake, a dark-haired youth, whose large, unquiet eyes seemed perpetually wandering to the various drawings which lie exposed here. My father will haveit that he is a genius indeed and a painter born.... And just where the crowd was busiest young Antony was found, hoisted into one of those empty niches of the oldHôtel de Ville, sketching the scene to the life, but with a kind of grace—a marvellous tact of omission, as my father pointed out to us, in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one's own window—which has made trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine seem like people in some fairyland.... His father will hear nothing of educating him as a painter."
"October1701.
"Chiefly through the solicitations of my father, old Watteau has consented to place Antony with a teacher of painting here.... Ah! such gifts as his, surely, may once in a way make much industry seem worth while.... He is apt, in truth, to fall out too hastily with himself and what he produces.... Yes! I could fancy myself offended by a sort of irony which sometimes crosses the half melancholy sweetness of manner habitual with him; only that, as I can see, he treats himself to the same quality."
So this gentle woman continues to record in her diary, as if musing on the life of one she loved, the salient happenings in Antony Watteau's career. Nothing escapes Walter Pater's sympathy and understanding, so that at the end we come to a perfect appreciation of his reading of Watteau. This essay, in the form of a journal, is a little masterpiece about a "little master." Under August 1705 we find the following:—
"Antony, looking well, in his new-fashioned, long-skirted coat, and taller than he really is, made us bring our cream and wild strawberries out of doors, ranging ourselves according to his judgment (for a hasty sketch in that big pocket-book he carries) on the soft slope of one of those fresh spaces in the wood, where the trees unclose a little, while Jean-Baptiste and my younger sister danced a minuet on the grass, to the notes of some strolling lutanist, who had found us out. He is visibly cheerful at the thought of his return to Paris, and became for a moment freer and more animated than I have ever yet seen him, as he discoursed to us about the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens in the church here."
Under August 1717 she writes: "Methinks Antony Watteau reproduces that gallant world, those patched and powdered ladies and fine cavaliers, so much to its own satisfaction, partly because he despises it; if this be a possible condition of excellent artistic production—he dignifies, by what in him is neither more nor less than a profound melancholy, the essential insignificance of what he wills to touch in all that, transforming its mere prettiness into grace. It looks certainly very graceful, fresh, animated, 'piquant,' as they love to say—yes! and withal, I repeat, perfectly pure, and may well congratulate itself on the loan of a fallacious grace not its own."
We are shown his restless nostalgia, his progress, success, and journeying to and fro, his broidery of the world he painted, until, as she says of a summer, "a kind of infectious sentiment passed upon us, like an efflux from its flowers and flower-like architecture."
"January1720.
"Those sharply-arched brows, those restless eyes which seem larger than ever—something that seizes on one, and is almost terrible, inhis expression—speak clearly, and irresistibly set one on the thought of a summing up of his life."
And then the end under date July 1721:—
"Antony Watteau departed suddenly, in the arms of M. Gersaint, on one of the late hot days of July. At the last moment he had been at work upon a crucifix for the goodcuréof Nogent, liking little the very rude one he possessed. He died with all the sentiments of religion.
"He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all."
The greatest gift in art is personality. But all masters are not of equal personality. Indeed, so rare is the gift in its fulness, that in the whole field of art there are but a few who appear as planets in the monotony of sidereal excellence.
Luminous examples of this quality of personality are such originals as Donatello, Holbein,Vermeer of Delft, and Watteau, to mention only a few of the most lovable. That something in an artist which finds a new way to express an old thing is the rarest and most to be desired of gifts. This gift Watteau had in the highest degree. He originated a grace unsurpassed in its way—dare I say it?—even by the Greeks. Attic simplicity of grace is grander, but not more beautiful, not more intimately beautiful. The Greeks gave us the grand beauty of form; Watteau gives us the beauty of caprice, of frills and fripperies; but his people are adorned by garments that lend them grace; his women walking are rhythmical lines, sitting they are silhouettes of delight, their garments enhancing beauty, not hiding it.
Watteau is the great master of the eighteenth century in France, a century distinctly feminine. To say that he is the most feminine painter that ever lived is in no sense a disparagement, for to this quality of grace and daintiness, of coquetry and caprice, of melancholy and longing, was united a very masculine quality of craft and originality in craft.
We tingle with delight in looking at his luscious colour and studying the mastery of itsapplication. What artist has not known the envious desire to possess one of his drawings, the part of his achievement which entitles him to be ranked with the greatest, so truthful, so full of subtle distinction of line, whether it be a blackamoor's face or a beauty's back.
The origin of the broken tone in modern art is his. From him we may trace the modern impressionist movement, and from him modern pointillism. What is impressionism, and what is pointillism?
Impressionism is the elimination of the little, the giving of the large truth, the instantaneous impression of vision; but all vision is not the same, and as the lens of the looking eye varies, so the impression will vary. We may teach ourselves to see little or much, our memory may be accurate or false, according to our gifts. Emerson says: "Our difference of wit appears to be only a difference of impressionability or power to appreciate faint, fainter, and infinitely faintest voices and visions." This faculty of seeing at the first glance "faint, fainter, and infinitely faintest," the impressionist claims. He may be so impressionable, or so little capable of sensitiveness to impression,that his picture in one instance may be fuller of fine truths than the most laborious idleness of finish can make it, and in the other his lack of sensitiveness to impression may be a mere jumble of decomposed colour understood only by himself.
Pointillism is the application of pure colour to the canvas in small streaks or dots, and has become part of the doctrine of the impressionists. To them it represents the decomposition of light; the streak and dot—broken colour—is used to increase the appearance of the vibration of light, which it does in a marvellous manner. The use of broken colour was one of Watteau's characteristics, and is part of the charm and originality of his technique.
Even his inconsistencies have charm. His drawings were from the life; his nudes were also from the life, so true to Nature are they, so very modern as to reflection and value, with the added Watteau grace. But, let me confess it, the modern craftsman more wedded to truth than inspiration may feel less conviction of his greatness in examining his pictures because, admire his colour and technique as much as we will, we cannot but feel that in his "invented"pictures Watteau's inspiration is what the student in France callschic. And yet who would have them different? His Pastorals may be "chic'd," but there they are, done—unrivalled, supreme.
Eighteenth-century art in France means, for most of us, Watteau. He is the fitting master of a century in which women played so great a part. He did not immortalise any woman. No Mona Lisa, no Giovanna Tornabuoni, no Emma Lady Hamilton, lives through his brush. He immortalised women—not any particular woman; he created a type, the Watteau type—adorable, dainty, and fragrant as a flower. She has no name, no place of abode since Watteau died. He saw her in his dream-life, held her for a moment as she flitted past, so she remains: eternally young, eternally free.
"Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leaveThe song, nor ever can those trees be bare;She cannot fade, ...For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!"
The plates are printed byBemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and London
The text at theBallantyne Press, Edinburgh
Page numbers in the Table of Contents have been adjusted to reflect the actual page numbers in this eText.