The Project Gutenberg eBook ofWatteauThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: WatteauAuthor: C. Lewis HindRelease date: December 14, 2012 [eBook #41621]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by sp1nd, David E. Brown and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images generously made available by TheInternet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WATTEAU ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: WatteauAuthor: C. Lewis HindRelease date: December 14, 2012 [eBook #41621]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by sp1nd, David E. Brown and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images generously made available by TheInternet Archive)
Title: Watteau
Author: C. Lewis Hind
Author: C. Lewis Hind
Release date: December 14, 2012 [eBook #41621]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by sp1nd, David E. Brown and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images generously made available by TheInternet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WATTEAU ***
PLATE I.—A PASTORAL. Frontispiece(In the Louvre, Paris)
The attribution to Watteau of this pretty pastoral has been questioned. It is thus described in the Louvre catalogue, "At the foot of a knoll, a shepherdess, with a yellow dress and a red bodice, sits turning to the left, to listen to a shepherd, seen from the back, wearing pink breeches and a violet vest, who plays on the flute; on the right a sheep and a dog. Landscape in the background."
THE apparition of Watteau in France in the early eighteenth century may be likened to the apparition of Giotto in Italy in the early fourteenth. Each was a genius; each broke away from the herd; each gave to the world a new vision; each inspired a school. But there the resemblance ends. Giotto's art was Christian, Watteau's Pagan; or, in otherwords, Giotto lived in an age when the aim of art was to teach religion, Watteau—well, his pictures were designed to delight. Giotto sought to remind men of Christianity, to bring them humbly to their knees with representations (marvellously fresh in those days when art was still groping in the Byzantine twilight) of the life of the Founder of Christianity, all its pathos, pity, and promise. Watteau gave joy and exhiliration to a generation temporally dull and morose, chilled by the academical art of the period, and apparently content with it. Watteau appeared: the little world about him looked at his pictures and, what a change! "Paris dressed, posed, picnicked, and conversed à la Watteau."
Poor Watteau! He gave, he gives joy, but he was sad, discontented, distrustful of himself and others. Sometimes Nature makes a great effort and unites genius to the sane mind and the sane body, as in a Titian, a Leonardo, a Shakespeare, a Goethe; more often she breathes genius into a fugitive and precarious shell, as in a Keats, a Francis Thompson, a Watteau, and ironically, or perhaps blessedly, gives them the phthisical temperament so that they crowd youth, adolescence, and age into a burst of hectic performances before they depart.
PLATE II.—THE BALL UNDER A COLONNADE(In the Dulwich Gallery)
This picture has suffered somewhat from time. But how delightful it is still; how gracious and debonair are the two dancing figures; how fascinating the colour in the woman's green striped rose skirt, and in the man's blue butterfly dress. There are seventy-three figures in this small canvas 1 ft. 7¾ ins. by 2 ft. ¼ ins.
In the following pages the life and art of Watteau are considered, also the curious effect of that life and art upon his biographers, also, frightening word! his technique, his marvellous technique, which is a veritable tonic to painters, who know the almost intolerable difficulties of expression.
His life? Why, it could be told in a page. His art? It is all stated in any one of his significant pictures. He belonged to that class of unfortunates who are never at rest in this world. Life to him was a wandering to find home. Always beyond the hills, any place where he did not happen to be at the moment, gleamed the spires of the City of Happiness and Contentment, beckoning, waiting, rising against the sky like the towers of New Jerusalem in Taddeo di Bartoli's "Death of the Virgin." He fled from the boredom of his home in Valenciennes, yet he died longing to return.
Watteau revealed his temperament, on the wing as it were, in his masterpiece "The Embarkment for Cythera." These ethereal and butterfly pilgrims of love should be happyenough in their enchanted garden on the border of the azure sea, but no! they are preparing lackadaisically to depart, to be wafted in the ship with the rose-coloured sail to the Island of Cythera, the abode of Venus, whom they worship for the joy of worship, without any desire of possession. On those lovely shores they will find no continuing city. Watteau knows that. Oh! but he was a cynic was this Watteau whose palette was a rainbow, and whose vision was like the flash of a kingfisher's wing in sunlight. Do you remember his "Fête Champêtre" at Dresden, with the little exquisite figure of a woman seated on the ground turning away from the spectator? Oh, her bright hair, and the dress—I am a man; but what a dress! What skill and knowledge in the drawing and painting of it! This little lady is essentially Watteau, who loved pretty clothes and budding figures, and whose drawing was as dainty as the frocks he composed; yet I do not think she is the real Watteau. Cast your eye to the left of the picture where stands an elderly, disdainful dandy. You meet this looker-on again and again in Watteau's pictures; he is in the FêteChampêtre and yet not of it; he knows how little all this affectation of gaiety really signifies; how transient is this commerce with joy, and yet he lingers there because in Watteau's world there is naught else to do. Yet he himself was always doing—a great worker. He knew, like Zola, that work is the anodyne for the "malady of the infinite" or of self, whichever you like to call it; but he had no wish to teach. He used his art to escape from the world to a dream-realm, where the sun always shines and where Monday morning never comes.
What was he like, this "exquisite little master," restless, changeable, obstinate, irritable, and misanthropic, whose influence on art has been so great? In his portrait of himself engraved by Boucher, the slight, nervous figure, alert, on the point of a petulant outbreak, looks a genius, but a man "gey ill to live with." I have a keener if a sadder vision of him in a portrait drawn by himself, "frightfully thin, almost deathlike." It is called "Watteau Laughing." Frightfully thin, almost deathlike, himself drawn by himself—laughing. That is Watteau.
It should be an easy task to state the salient facts in the life of a world-renowned painter who lived but thirty-seven years, and who died in 1721; but until the discovery by the brothers De Goncourt, in a second-hand book-shop, of the life of Watteau, written by his friend the Comte de Caylus and read by him before the French Academy in 1748, our knowledge had to be gleaned mainly from the notes to catalogues of his collected works.
The little Flemish town of Valenciennes was ceded to France in 1677—seven years before a son was born to Jean Philippe Watteau and his wife Michelle Lardenoise. This son was baptized on the 10th of October 1684 and given the names of Jean Antoine. Jean Philippe, his father, was a tiler, desirous no doubt that his son should succeed him in his own sensible occupation; but discovering Jean Antoine's predilection for covering everything he could find with drawings, grotesque and otherwise, of the strolling players and mountebanks thatpassed through the little town, he submitted to fate and placed him with the official painter of the municipality, named Gerin. Under him Watteau painted "La Vraie Gaieté," his first important attempt at a picture. This was followed by "Le Retour de Guingette," and then his master died. The year was 1701, the age of Watteau seventeen.
It may be said that with Gerin's death Watteau's boyhood died. His father, seeing little return for his expenditure, refused to continue to pay for instruction. Life at home became unbearable to the sensitive youth to whom his calling was as the call of the sea to the sailor-born.
If there was so much of interest in Valenciennes for a painter, what might not the capital offer of spectacular delights? So one morning Antoine left home and walked to Paris, where he found work with Métayer, a scene-painter; but Métayer's patronage soon ceased, and Watteau found himself alone in Paris. Now began his period of penury and the making of the master; also probably, through hunger and cold, the engendering of the disease, consumption, which was to force his genius to itsrapid development and from which he was to die. Paris, the marvellous Paris of his dreams, was beautiful, but without heart. Watteau strolled by her river's bank, crept for shelter into the great church of Notre-Dame, wandered out again, and at last found work of a kind that would at least keep him from starvation.
On the Pont Notre-Dame there were shops, exposing daubs, painted by the dozen, for sale. Necessity compelled and Watteau sought and obtained employment at one of these picture manufactories. He proved himself a facile workman, and soon his task became so easy that he could paint from memory the head of St. Nicolas, which it was his duty to repeat over and over again. The other journeymen artists painted skies, draperies, heads, hands, saints, angels, to each a set task, and the payment was proportionate to their skill. Watteau's remuneration for the week's work amounted to three livres—a little more than three francs—and a daily bowl of soup! A less determined youth than this weakling might have succumbed or renounced his ambitions, but Watteau worked and waited patiently until he could extricate himself from these uncongenial surroundings.
The future painter of dainty and luxurious visions of wealth and breeding was ambitious, if miserable.
He forgot to be hungry, because his hours of leisure from the tyranny of the picture manufactory were filled with the joy of drawing incessantly everything that passed before his eyes, from the turn of a head to the flutter of a tempestuous petticoat. A bowl of soup for dinner is an excellent aid to work, and this period no doubt intensified Watteau's love of work and of Nature. The lifeless things he had to copy at the manufactory sent him into the realms of the real, and his great gift of "seeing" was storing up for him innumerable observations which were to be the structure of his future fancies.
One lucky day Watteau met Claude Gillot, the decorative painter, who on seeing his drawings invited him to live in his house and become his pupil and assistant. So ended his period of absolute want; henceforward Watteau began to find himself, even as disease had already found and marked him.
Claude Gillot's influence upon the formation of Watteau's taste and talent must not be underrated.He was a man of much ability, quite unlike the cold and formal painters of his time. His was a gay art: the mythology of lovers and nymphs, and the light life of the Italian Comedy—Pantaloon, Columbine, and Pierrot—"strange motley—coloured family, clothed in sunshine and silken striped." Gillot is certainly one of Watteau's earliest inspirers: his revolt against convention (even if revolt be too strong a word) influenced Watteau to the end of his life. With this happyrencontrebegan the serious development of Watteau's art. Life, no longer sordid, became luxurious in thought and application. Supersensitive, the artist mind of the pupil touched and extracted the taste of his master, improved upon it, and strengthened its own tendency for all that was dainty, elegant, and whimsical. Gillot's was a good influence; a capable craftsman, he gave freely, but the jealous side of his nature soon recognised in his intuitive pupil not only an adaptation of his own methods, but also an improvement upon them. In Watteau, no doubt, he saw his own faults, but he also saw his own virtues made finer and rarer. Whatever the reason, over-much similarity of temperament, professionaljealousy, or irritability on Gillot's side; ingratitude, sensitiveness, fickleness, or a sense of superiority on Watteau's, this mutually helpful friendship of five years ended abruptly. We may never know the cause of the quarrel, but we do know that Watteau, although he always warmly praised Gillot's work and admitted his personal indebtedness, refused to be questioned in regard to their disagreement, and was silent about it even to his most intimate friends. Curious to relate, Gillot ceased to paint when Watteau left him, and became an etcher and engraver. Watteau certainly dated the knowledge of his own talent from his association with Gillot, his first real master.
PLATE III.—L'INDIFFÉRENT(In the Louvre, Paris)
Through Watteau's dream-world trips "L'Indifférent," rainbow-hued, mercurial, his indifference assumed, not troubling to conceal the sad thoughtfulness that lurks in his expression. Who can describe Watteau's colour or his fashion of trickling on the paint? The technique of "L'Indifférent" is marvellous.
Claude Audran, to whom he went in 1708 at the age of twenty-four (taking his friends Pater and Lancret with him), was keeper or rather doorkeeper of the Luxembourg Palace, and a painter of the ornamental decorations then in vogue. Garlands and arabesques were his speciality. He taught his system of decoration to Watteau, who, sensitive to every artistic sensation, gleaned perhaps from Audran the sense of rhythmic line and made it one of his own chief characteristics.
Living in the Luxembourg Palace he had access to the pictures; he studied them, especially the works of Rubens. Restlessly he would roam the gardens of the Palace, enchanted and inspired by the figures wandering down the paths and grouping themselves under the great trees. Watteau, dallying in the gardens, remembering the theatrical methods of Métayer, the subjects of Gillot, the flexibility and fancy of Audran, the daring of the great Rubens, began to develop into an original. Gradually, too, he grew restless, feeling that he was not wholly free to paint his dreams. A vague nostalgia persuaded his artistic temperament that it was his home he wanted to see—Valenciennes and his people. Be that as it may, this was the reason he gave for leaving Audran, who had always been kind and appreciative; although the wily painter of garlands and arabesques tried to dissuade hisprotégéfrom painting pictures, fearing to lose so able an assistant in his own ornamental work. Before parting from Audran, Watteau made his first real essay in his second manner, a picture of "The Departure of the Troops," a reminiscence of the life at Valenciennes. This work he sold to the dealerSirois for sixty livres, and with the money he started for home, despite Audran's protests.
Valenciennes at that time was gay with soldiers anddames galantesand Watteau painted several military pictures—groups marked with truth, yet full of grace; he also filled his sketch-books with incomparable drawings. But he could not long resist the call of Paris. Valenciennes seemed to have grown smaller, less interesting. The painter fretted in the narrow sphere of the provincial town; once again his wayward feet were set towards the capital. He arrived in Paris in 1709, and before long persuaded himself that he would like to visit Rome. With this end in view he competed for thePrix de Rome, but succeeded only in obtaining second prize. Soon recovering from the disappointment, he painted a companion picture to the work he had sold to Sirois for sixty livres, but for the companion he asked and obtained two hundred and sixty livres. These two pictures he borrowed from Sirois and hung in a room, where he knew they would be seen by the Academicians as they passed from one apartment to another. The painter De la Fosse, impressed by their colourand quality, paused and asked the name of the author. He was informed that they were the work of a young and unknown man who craved intercession with the king for a "pension" in order that he might study in Italy. De la Fosse sent for Watteau, whom he found modest, shy, and deprecatory of his work. Watteau stated his desire to study abroad. He was told—the episode in these days seems hardly credible—to his astonishment and joy, that there was no need for him to study with any one; that he was already master; that he would honour the Academy if he would consent to become a member, and that he had only to present himself to be enrolled. This he did and was duly elected, the inauguration fee in consideration of his circumstances being reduced to one hundred livres. And so in 1712, at the age of twenty-eight, the poor unknown, who failed to win the first prize in thePrix de Rome, was made free of the Academy, was given the new title ofpeintre des Fêtes Galantes, and became, almost in a bound, famous.
Ill and moody, he worked incessantly at his drawings and the pictures which were making it possible for him eventually to produce hismasterpiece, "The Embarkment for Cythera." Always dissatisfied with his work, he did not ratify his election to the Academy by sending in his diploma picture until 1717. The patience of the Academy being exhausted, he was reminded of the rule that each newly elected member must present a picture. In a brilliant dash he finished "The Embarkment for Cythera," which was accepted on August 28, 1717, as hispièce de reception.
No longer was there poverty to contend with. Success followed success. The Academy had set its seal upon him. Everybody wanted Watteaus. In 1716, the year before he sent in hispièce de reception, he had gone to live with M. de Crozat, whose beautiful house in the Rue Richelieu and his country mansion at Montmorency were filled with works of the old masters, drawings and paintings. We are told that Crozat possessed four hundred pictures of the Venetian and Flemish schools, thousands of drawings, of which two hundred and twenty-nine were by Rubens, one hundred and twenty-nine by Van Dyck, one hundred and six by Veronese, and one hundred and thirteen by Titian. In these luxurious houses of his admiringfriend and patron, Watteau might have lived with delight and profit. The park of the country house at Montmorency became the background which inspired his Pastorals, the perfection of his art; this perfection the study of the old masters aided somewhat, no doubt, but Watteau was now master himself, and in knowing them confronted his peers. Here too, for the first time, he met his models as an equal—untrammelled. This man of "medium height and insignificant appearance," whose eyes showed "neither talent nor liveliness," was on familiar and friendly terms with the company gathered at M. de Crozat's house—ladies of fashion, from whom in old days he tried to steal for his note-book a line of neck, a turn of wrist, furtively and hastily, asked nothing better than to be party to his pictures in gardens gay with mondaines, male and female. He observed and painted. We can almost hear the frou-frou of their garments in his pictures.
M. de Julienne, another patron, was full of enthusiasm and eager to possess his works; it was for him that Watteau painted the replica, carried farther and more finished, of the "Embarkmentfor Cythera," which is now at Potsdam. All the world smiled upon Watteau, but the world's favours only made the more capricious and melancholy this incurable brooder over the unattainable. Loving no woman as he loved his art, he longed for tenderness, yet was afraid of it. Cold, shy, fastidious, reserved, ill, he shunned society now that it sought him, and drugged himself with work as a refuge from ennui and from nostalgia for no earthly country.
He left M. de Crozat's house, independence being more vital to him than luxury, and found a companion in Nicolas Vleughels, whom he had met at M. de Julienne's. The two lived together until 1718. Once more the desire for solitude assailed him. M. de Julienne, who seems always to have been his devoted friend, admonished the ailing painter and begged him to be more careful about his material welfare, as indeed all his other friends did, to whom he retorted, "At the worst there is the hospital; no one is refused there!" His friends advised him to travel. Of all places he chose London, and arrived on these shores in 1719, finding lodgings at Greenwich.
In London his physician, Dr. Mead, presentedhim to the king, for whom he painted four pictures, which are now at Buckingham Palace. His health showed no improvement, and the English climate aggravated his illness. In a letter to Gersaint he wrote of "Le mauvais air qui regne à Londres à cause de la vapeur du charbon de terre dont on fait usage."
Dr. Mead, aware no doubt that his condition was hopeless, advised him to return to Paris. This he did, and settled in the house of Gersaint, son-in-law to Sirois, for whom he painted the delightful picture called "Gersaint's Sign,"—"just to limber up his fingers," as he expressed it.
Restlessness again seized him. He believed that he would recover in the country. His friend the Abbé Haranger asked M. le Fèvre to find him accommodation in a house at Nogent, and thither he went in 1721.
But the end was near, and Watteau, realising it, proceeded to set his house in order and to make amends for his shortcomings of friendship and of temper, the importance of which the dying man magnified. He sent for his townsman and pupil, Pater, asked forgivenessfor having in the past retarded his advancement through fear of rivalry, and made ample amends by giving Pater daily instruction and revealing to him his intimate knowledge of his craft. Pater said, after Watteau's death, that this was "the only fruitful teaching he had ever received." His townsman no doubt brought back to the dying painter thoughts of home. Ever hopeful, like all consumptives, he was sure that a change of air would cure him!
PLATE IV.—THE EMBARKMENT FOR CYTHERA(In the Louvre, Paris)
In 1717 Watteau finished, after a long delay, hispièce de receptionfor the Academy, the famous first study for "The Embarkment for Cythera." This picture was painted in seven days, and elaborated, but hardly improved, in the Potsdam version. Behold these ethereal and butterfly pilgrims of love preparing lackadaisically to be wafted in the ship with the rose-coloured sail to the abode of Venus. On those lovely shores they will find no continuing city. Watteau knows that.
He instructed Gersaint to sell everything, and to make preparations for the journey home. He made the journey home, but not to Valenciennes. He died suddenly in Gersaint's arms on July 18, 1721.
He was artist to the end. "Take away that crucifix," he said to the priest; "it pains me. How could an artist dare to treat my Master so shockingly." It is said that one of the last remarks of this sensitive, ill-balanced, disease-stricken man of genius was to beg the Abbé Haranger to forgive him for having used his face and figure for his picture of "Gilles."
So at the age of thirty-seven he escaped finallyfrom reality—that reality which his art had always avoided so delightfully and so convincingly.
Watteau's art appeals to everybody, and fascinates all who study it attentively. The lovely decorative pictures tell their own story; and for those who require more than a story in a picture, there is his craftsmanship, his originality, his personality; the delight of comparing one alluring achievement with another, and the interest in noting the inferiority of his followers—Lancret, Pater, and the rest—who annexed his manner but who could not annex the flame of his genius. Visit the Dulwich Gallery, study and enjoy Watteau's "Ball under a Colonnade," then go to Hertford House and examine Pater's copy of Watteau's "Ball." The fire of genius and glory of colour are gone. It is as stolid as Paul Potter's "Bull."
I have an especial affection for "The Ball under a Colonnade" at Dulwich; for until the regal gift of Hertford House to the nation, with its nine Watteaus, this little "Ball undera Colonnade," and in a lesser degree its companion picture at Dulwich, a "Fête Champêtre," were my first wanderings in the lyric land of Watteau. The National Gallery which, before the present Director came into office, treated the French school with an indifference that almost amounted to disdain, does not possess a single Watteau. Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Cambridge own examples of varying merit, and there is one in that treasure-house of rare and strange things, Sir John Soane's Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields. It is probable that the nation possesses yet another example. "A Watteau in the Jones' Collection" was the surprising heading of an article in a recent number of theBurlington Magazineby Mr. Claude Phillips, who claims that the little Watteau-like picture called "The Swing" in the Jones' Collection at South Kensington is a veritable Watteau.
Germany is rich in Watteaus, with ten at Potsdam and five in Berlin. France, which should be the richest, is poorer in number and importance than either Germany or England, although there are ten examples in the Louvre, including the original "Embarkmentfor Cythera," "L'Indifférent," and "Jupiter and Antiope."
PLATE V.—JUPITER AND ANTIOPE(In the Louvre, Paris)
"Jupiter and Antiope" suggests Titian and Rubens filtered through Watteau. This nude studied from life, not painted from his drawings, is more laboured than his other pictures, but the loss of spontaneity in the colour is compensated by the truth and beauty of the abandon of the beautiful limbs in repose. Brown Jupiter, blonde Venus—no attenuation of the truth here—lights loaded, browns rich with pearly reflections on the fair skin.
Let us return for a moment to "The Ball under a Colonnade" at Dulwich, which from its own inherent charm and from its position in that quiet and reposeful gallery may fitly serve as an introduction to the art of Watteau. Take a chair—they permit it at Dulwich—and seat yourself before it. The picture has suffered, alas! somewhat from Time, which has almost obliterated the fairy-like fountain. But how charming the picture is still; how gracious and debonair are the two dancing figures; how fascinating the broken colour in the woman's green-striped, rose skirt and in the man's blue butterfly dress. There are seventy-three figures in the small canvas, 1 ft. 7¾ in. by 2 ft. ¼ in. You can almost hear the musicians playing, the fall of water from the fading fountain, the rustle of leaves, and the ripple of laughter. Think of the painters, dead and gone, who have loved this "Ball under a Colonnade." Constable was one of them. He was not afraid to praise a picture when he liked it. Listen to this—Constable's criticism of a copy that Leslie had made of Watteau's "Ball." Heasked Constable what he thought of the copy, and the great man answered:—
"Your copy looks colder than the original, which seems as if painted in honey—so mellow, so tender, so soft, and so delicious; so I trust yours will be; but be satisfied if you but touch the hem of his garment, for this inscrutable and exquisite thing would vulgarise even Rubens and Paul Veronese."
The amount of work done by Watteau, accused by his friend De Caylus of idleness, was enormous. A chronological list is almost impossible, because many of his works are lost or were destroyed during the Revolution.
Watteau painted anything and everything, during his connection with Gillot and Audran, from pictures to powder-boxes, never considering that his art was too high and lofty for the embellishment of any object suitable for painting upon. His work may be divided into three classes: first manner—Italian Comedy and decorative work; second—Military Scenes; third and finest manner—The Pastorals.
As a boy he produced some military pictures, and he reverted to them while with Audran. It is difficult to place chronologically any givensubject, for while we may arbitrarily classify a picture as belonging to one period or another, his Italian Comedy scenes, belonging to the first period, persisted to the end.
With the exception of his boyish endeavours, inspired by Teniers before he visited Paris, his first manner was almost entirely decorative, and included paintings on screens, coach panels, and furniture. The military pictures belong to a short period dating from his success in selling them to Sirois and their approval by the Academy. They are few in number—thirteen only were engraved.
The year 1712 was the beginning of his recognition and the end of poverty. Between this date and 1716 he produced his marvellous nudes. Of all Watteau's pictures the nudes seem undoubtedly to have been painted from Nature and not from drawings. They are too true to life, too well observed. All his other pictures, even the greatest of his Pastorals, have the air of being imagined. His drawings were his documents, and these, like the nudes, were of course made direct from Nature. The fantasy of his pictures is founded on fact, but it is fantasy which sees only what it wishes tosee—the rhythmic line, the rainbow colour, the happy melancholy.
The year 1716 was big with significance to Watteau; he awoke in his own land—dream-land of his Pastorals. Then he began to live, and there were before him but five short years of life. He never again left this land of fantasy—except when, on his return from London, he painted "Gersaint's Sign," that model of modishness and grace, painted in eight mornings, representing Gersaint's shop whereélégantesbuy masterpieces from shop-keepers as elegant as themselves. This picture, which is now in the possession of the German Emperor, has for some mysterious reason been divided into two portions.
In 1717, as I have related, he finished after a long delay hispièce de receptionfor the Academy, the famous first study for the "Embarkment for Cythera." What can be said of this picture, or of the more finished replica at Potsdam, that has not already been said a score of times? It is referred to and described in the Prologue to this book as one of his significant pictures. It moves in a rhythm of life, of love, of colour; rose reds, golden yellows,faint purples, greys of every gamut, meeting and melting—one perfect whole, and over all is a lingering regret of "I know not what." This picture was painted in seven days, and elaborated, but hardly improved, in the Potsdam version.
Turn from this consummate work to his early "La Vraie Gaieté," inspired by Teniers, which in essence is the same picture as "The Ball under a Colonnade" at Dulwich, and even the "Amusements Champêtres" and the "Champs Elysées" at Hertford House. The clothes are changed, the handling has become lighter and more accomplished—that is all. The observer, that saturnine, detached, cynical figure, who appears in so many of Watteau's pictures, is already present in "La Vraie Gaieté." 'This solitary figure is, as I have already said, the symbol of Watteau himself, ever aloof, ever contemptuous, even when sharing in the scenic world of Watteau, where life, if not really true, is certainly not false. His people are lotus-eaters, who are come to a land where it is always afternoon, where "the charmed sunset lingered low adown in the red west ... and many a winding vale andmeadow, set with slender galingale." A mild melancholy possesses the inhabitants of this dream-world, for they are happy and yet a little sad, musing on what can never be. Through this dream-world "L'Indifférent" trips lightly, typical of Watteau, rainbow-hued, mercurial, his indifference assumed, not troubling to conceal the sad thoughtfulness that lurks in his expression. We do not believe in his snapping fingers and his jaunty air. What colour are his beautiful garments? Rosy white, greeny white, lavendar white with rose red knots, and rose red mantle lined with bluebell blue, white frills falling over the sensitive hands, his butterfly decorations rustling as he passes—"L'Indifférent." The technique of the picture, in its modern chromatic use of colour, is marvellous. The hues of the rainbow meander through it all. Who can describe Watteau's colour or his fashion of trickling on the paint, as fascinating in its way as the method of Frans Hals, whose seduction is "the way he paints," not what he paints? Hals, the great master of character, frank, open, plebeian, is akin in technique to Watteau. What æsthetic joy these masters of technique give us as westudy the manipulation of their paint. Hals flicks on his ruffles frankly, joyously—brutally. 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. One may stand for hours at Hertford House in front of any of his pictures and quite forget the subject in delight of the workmanship.
Consider "The Music Lesson." In colour it is 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. The movement, pose, and costume of the players is the same as the musicians in the "Musical Party," also at Hertford House. Delightful too in "Gilles and His Family." Gilles is dressed in thin, white, supple satin, lined with rose and striped with faint blue, and his white mantle is lined with blue. The dark bias of the guitar binds the group of people together, all of whom it touches or crosses. A seated woman nurses a little black and white dog, while a child nestles up to her, peeping beneath the guitar; thefaces are more alert and smiling than usual, and the picture, although less pearly than "The Music Lesson," is not less beautiful in colour.
"Jupiter and Antiope" at the Louvre suggests Titian and Rubens filtered through Watteau. This nude studied from life, not painted from his drawings, is more laboured than his other pictures, but the loss of spontaneity in the colour is compensated by the truth and beauty of the abandon of the beautiful limbs in repose. Brown Jupiter, blonde Venus—no attenuation of the truth here—lights loaded, browns rich, with pearly reflections on the fair skin.
The attribution of the delightful "Pastoral" at the Louvre, although generally accepted, has been questioned. The elegant little lady shepherdess is in rose red, a red that seems to belong only to Velazquez and to Watteau; she sits watching, not the flock of one sheep and one wondering dog, no! she is listening to the Arcadian shepherd playing his flute. Very Watteau-like is the landscape.
Turn from these little works to the larger pictures, such as "The Return from the Chase," painted for his patron M. de Julienne towardsthe end of his life—a marvel of rhythmic line and tone; and to "Les Amusements Champêtres"—a bouquet of colour like no other colour, old rose, old blue, silvery yellow, prune purple, all partaking one of the other. In the distance people are sitting and standing and dancing in colours unrivalled.
So we may pass through the whole range of his production finding constantly some new surprise of colour, some new mastery in the weaving of his webs. Call Watteau, if you like, a painter of the frivolous side of life, but you must also call him one of the few originals whose pictures vivify because they stimulate, and because they excite interest in his method which marked a new epoch in art. "We consider Watteau," says his countryman, M. Camille Mauclair, "the most original and most representative master of French art; Watteau, Delacroix, and Monet are the three beacons of that art."
PLATE VI.—THE FOUNTAIN(In the Wallace Collection)
One of his smaller pictures, 17½ ins. high by 13¼ wide, called also "La Cascade." It attracts attention by reason of the somewhat theatrical way in which the dainty silhouette of the figures is set against the opening between the trees. But how charming are these figures bathed in light and mirrored in the pool that ripples at their feet.